#it will probably take less then actor bracket did the first time

[fictional-actors-bracket]

I have an upcoming exam, so I probably won't be able to work on the bracket till Friday, but I promise I'll try to get it out as fast as I can

#media bracket #it will probably take less then actor bracket did the first time #because I now have more experience #anyway I hate romantic literature #and I can't wait to get over with this exam

[flyingcookierambles]

sadness over a3! eng i guess

oof just on my 700th day.....

kinda sad because of the announcement about A3! ENG server shutting down soon due to financial difficulties at LIBER/CYBIRD in the past two years (covid-19 related, etc.). according to a rather in depth reddit comment that had links to LIBER's publicly available financial reports + some financial reports from LIBER's parent company, Aeria, in english, covid-19 really hit LIBER hard since they had to cancel many money making events, from pop-up shops for the typical anime merch trinkets (keychains, plushes, pins, etc.) to the huge in-person events (voice actor meetups, the stage plays of MANKAI LIVE, etc.). due to shrinking player base on the ENG server + major loss of profits on both JPN and ENG servers, LIBER had to choose one or the other and they chose the JPN one, which i totally understand since it's way bigger there and the JPN fanbase will continue to give the franchise money more often. also, another person found a financial report/estimate from the google play store or something, and A3! ENG only made ~$20K to ~$10K in the past few months, which i guess is not enough to keep a server and localization company afloat. 

i got pretty attached to the characters and it was a great game to help get by during college. and honestly, while i am very sad about this, again, i understand why LIBER did this, looking at their financial report from 2020. I would LIBER save the entire franchise rather than shut all the servers down, making us all unable to see our favorite actors ever again, even if it means that we ENG fans will have to go thru the extra steps of finding/reading fan translations, wikis, etc., to read any further stories from where A3! ENG left off. still, A3! ENG's localization was something special. i'm saying this as a TKRB JPN player who read the wiki for all the character voice lines and then had to see the official TKRB ENG localization make Yamabushi Kunihiro a rapper for some reason? lol. it was....weird.... meanwhile, all the memes and slang in A3! ENG didn't seem out of place and all fit their personalities because 3/4 of the troupes were all high school to college age and 3 of them were ~Gamers~. Out of all the gachas i've played, i feel like the only other F2P gacha game that had this incredibly smooth, all cultural jokes/puns translated in a way that still makes sense/fits the character/doesn't require a galaxy brain and some TL note to understand, is probably dragalia lost and that's only because it has frickin Nintendo localizing/publishing it globally for CyGames. Nintendo. i'll eventually read the fan translations of A3!'s Act 3 on the wiki, but it won't be the same without Kazunari's super high-energy influencer slang of "'whoa fam! that's totes 'blammable, gotta take a pic!" or Itaru's gremlin Gamer speak of "lol get rekt noobs" or Tsuzuru's tired dying breath of "that ain't it chief." the appropriate slang and relatable meme speak of the localization really helped humanize these characters as people of their respective ages, rather than just a typical formal speak or some directly translated JPN slang -> ENG that turns out super awkward that can be found in bad localizations.

going back to the reddit comment too, the death of A3! ENG servers could have bad repercussions in the future for other joseimuke games. josei, if you for some reason have been in the anime fandom but still don't know this term, is basically the genre of stories/video games/media/etc aimed at women. it's the mature adult counterpart to seinen, media aimed at adult men. basically shoujo/shonen = elementary/middle school/high school aimed while josei/seinen = high school/college/adult aimed if that helps. Joseimuke is a part of josei that is not specifically romance. while some josei/joseimuke can overlap with otome, aka female aimed dating sims/romance media, they have many things about them that make these all separate genres. one of the official A3! ENG translators and a known fan translator of another joseimuke gacha, Mahou Yaku/Wizard’s Promise, minami, goes more in depth with this in a twitter thread. 

A3! was an actor raising game, and a big part of it was found family and relationships that were platonic. yet it got advertised as an otome, which has more connotations with dating sims and brings to mind other shoujo/otome games and anime where the cast is all high schoolers and the setting is most often in a high school. but, other than some characters making flirty jokes or implied to have crushes on Izumi/player character, many character relationships with Izumi are platonic and not romantic at all. Spring Troupe in the game also jokingly calls themself a family. the entire Mankai Company is basically found family. plus, since the game actually has time passing in story and the characters age with each year, half of the characters aren’t even in high school anymore. a large majority of them are in college or are graduated by now, with only a few still in high school. i’m not surprised if a reason that some people left the game was due to feeling bored with the slice of life/not romantic story, feeling that they were lied to about it being an otome, which was falsely advertised since it is a game meant for the older teens/adults demographic of josei/joseimuke.

i’m worried that other japanese companies will look at this shut down as a “josei/joseimuke doesn’t work well in the west” and never localize other josei/joseimuke gacha games like Mahou Yaku, EnStars, Twisted Wonderland, Helios, etc.

while i like otome and shoujo, i, as a 23/soon to be 24 year old college graduate and now tax paying adult, want more stories that have more mature themes and characters that are more my age so i don’t have to feel awkward when i’m playing some dating sim and i, a literal 23 year old adult, and trying to woo a 16 year old. it’s...a little awkward to say the least. i would gladly welcome more mature media that is categorized as josei/joseimuke.

sorry if this is all over the place, but overall im just sad that A3! ENG is shutting down. i don’t know if i’ll join the JPN server yet. i’m def going to read the Act 3 story via fan translators on the wiki, but A3! gameplay was...boring lmao. as much as i love A3!, im sure that the constant event grind/burnout and boring rng gameplay turned people off too and i dont blame them. i felt the burnout bad since i participated in basically every event since day 1. it. is. rough. i’m not joining the hellish thunderdome that is the JPN server and im not ranking anymore as a F2P player lmao. literally had to play almost every waking free moment to get into the 30%-20% bracket as a F2P person and i never got to top 20%-10%, much less top 1% lmao. i’m don’t whale enough lol. 

i feel like i should probably just. crack open my genki 2 textbook and uhhh totally legal pdf copy of tobira. so i can just. get the JPN version of games in the first place so i don’t have to worry about getting shafted since overseas fans are often considered expendable. 

i wish that, when any games that are online end, gacha or mmo or anything, anything online, companies will let fans archive things. or like. release a book that is just the story text or something. like. CYBIRD is letting us still technically play the game and have the story and all, but what if they eventually later shut everything down? why not just release a pdf/ebook that’s just the text of the eng localization for some money? i’d buy it. for nostalgia and rereads and all and also archiving purposes. i think i’ll try to help with any english localization archive projects if i can so that the hilarious and incredible localization that was a work of love from the translation team doesn’t just disappear forever.

well.

that’s it for now. as i said, guess i’ll head to the app for one of the last times to read the last unread stories and mini stories i have left, then the wiki for Act 3, and then i guess i’ll crack open genki 2 and bunpo.....

some fun random links for you to think about!

random ffxi article that came to mind (if ffxiv ever shuts down in the next 20 years or whatever i’d be cool to get a statue of my character at the end)

and death of a game playlist by NerdSlayer Studios on Youtube that has me thinking a lot about game preservation and losing MMOs and games

the lost media wiki  and blameitonjorge’s lost media iceberg

other gacha games i’ve played that have shut down that i think about sometimes because the loss of A3! ENG isn’t my first rodeo:

terra battle & terra battle 2 (1)

AFTERL!FE

(related kitsu post link for archive reasons)

#rambles #games n junk #sad over a3! eng loss #a3!

[fullkingdomphilosopher]

Moriarty is not dead (yet)

Hello and a warm welcome to the three people who have somehow lost their way here. You are in for a ride. (Hope you read to the end.)   :)

Because today I feel the need to waste my time by sharing my thoughts about a fictional character into the void of the internet to get it out off my mind. It might get a little long and unstructured at points so please bare with me. But you have been warned. So without further ado let us discuss why (BBC Sherlock’s) Moriarty is in fact. not. dead. (I have read many illogical theories about this topic so I am not claiming in any way to have come up with everything myself. The following will be a mixture of canon facts,  my own thoughts and other people ideas. Irrelevant/not so convincing information will be stated in brackets or I will probably leave most of it out. Get comfortable and enjoy.)

Let us begin at the beginning by first taking a look at the information we get about Moriarty throughout the series. Please keep this general information in mind for later. (Here I will only comment if at all very superficially. Most are only general impressions I not necessarily agree with.)

(1) One can simply summarise season ones information about Moriarty the following way:  

1. Moriarty is a criminal mastermind (consulting criminal)

2. He is bored, insane, intelligent, rich and powerfull

3. Sherlock-fanboy

4. Has not too much will to live

(2) So now let us take a more or less objective look at season two or more precisely some parts of »The Reichenbach fall«.                                                  

•Near the end Moriarty sits at the edge of the roof playing “stayin‘ alive” which he then upon Sherlocks‘ arrival comments by saying: “ (...)The Final Problem. “Staying Alive”. So boring, isn’t it? It’s just… staying.(...)”.                              

This tells us the following (does it?) : 

1. Moriarty is bored of living and wants to die 

2. Moriarty has planned for Sherlock to die now

3. Both

•Later while convincing Sherlock to jump he makes the mistake to say: “ (Your death is the only thing that’s going to call off the killers.) I’m certainly not going to do it.” which leads to the conclusion that Moriarty needs to die to make Sherlock jump. And by no means do I deny that Moriarty is mad enough to go as far as to kill himself only to win against Sherlock. (If he could have been completly sure to win he definitely would do so without hesitation.) He IS insane after all.

•Before shooting his brain out while talking to Sherlock he seems very...emotional. Since he is (very quickly) convinced now that Sherlock is not an ordinary person moreover he even is HIM (Moriarty) he can/has to die now peacefully (because he doesn‘t feel alone anymore) forcing Sherlock to jump.

Okay so now let us be a little more sceptical. You are telling me that we fully accept Sherlock beeing able to fake his death with Mycrofts help and even with a list of different plans but for the guy whose LITERAL job it is to fake deaths and who has an equally high IQ (or even higher) than Sherlock, it seems unlikely? (Keep in mind Moriarty is actually the superior one in this scene. We will discuss this later.) Moriarty didn‘t even care where the two of them would meet. It‘s like you can almost hear him say: “Wherever faking your death is easier for you darling. I will win anyway.” He actually wanted Sherlock to survive because he has bigger plans for him. Just think about it: if you were a psychopath and bored your whole live and then finally miraculously you find an interesting fragile toy, would you break it quickly or rather carefully play with it for as long as it still gives you joy? Also faking ones death by a shot in the head seems possible at almost any location. Just saying. (This one is a little far stretched but if Moriarty IS Sherlock wouldn't he do exactly the same thing? Faking his death, disappearing for a while and then amazingly coming back from the dead? But let's not digress.)   He wants Sherlock to survive so badly he actually helps him by giving him hints (thats what the bored kind of criminal does). Did you notice how Moriarty after saying “I’m certainly not going to do it.” (You really think he would make such a dumb mistake while not even being pressured by anything?) turns his head back and expectedly looks at Sherlock?And he doesn't do so to watch him jump. If that was the case I believe he would give him his whole attention instead of shortly looking over his shoulder, no he waits for Sherlock to get it, to react. But let‘s continue with what happens before Moriarty “spontaneously” decides to kill himself. After their dramatic chat Moriarty shakes Sherlocks hand (which confuses Sherlock) and only lets go when he shoots himself. This might be a sign for his men/snipers for scenario “fake death” so they can shoot somewhere near him or anything like that. He could have faked his death by blood pakets in his coat, drugs, sleeping spray you name it. I don't really care how he did it (it‘s pointless to spectaculate about this) but I am quite sure if someone would find a way to do this it would be him.(Another thing is that while Moriarty drops dead to the ground he doesn't let go of the gun which is rather strange...and the blood only streamed from his head instead of splattering. But let us just write this off as a movie mistake. After all everybody makes mistakes. Also things on TV probably can't be too gory.)

(3) Season three. I think this is the most confusing season regarding the information about Moriarty. First of all we indirectly get to know from Anderson (yes I know very reliable source) that Moriarty‘s body wasn't found since his theory regarding Sherlock‘s death indicates that Moriarty‘s dead body with a sherlock mask on his face was used as Sherlock‘s dead body on the pavement. And while yes this is very ridiculous I think it is strange how Lestrade didn‘t correct him on the fact that it couldn‘t be Moriarty‘s body since it was found on the roof. (But admittedly this doesn't need to mean anything. Maybe Lestrade was just too fed up with him already.) However the confusing part just starts here. If we assume no body was found then how do they know Moriarty is dead? Who gave them this information? If you take a closer look it seems only people somehow related to Sherlock seem to know about Moriarty‘s death. But on TV they NEVER mention anything about it. They only report about how Moriarty supposedly was only an actor named Richard Brook paid by Sherlock to seem smart and about Sherlock falling or jumping to his death. Okay so they probably have got this information from Kitty but wouldn‘t it be very strange if Richard Brook committed suicide on this same roof before Sherlock jumped? Why would he do that? Also while still “playing” Moriarty since he didn't wear Brook‘s clothes? Nothing I can think of makes any sense how you could explain to the public why Richard Brook decided to commit suicide there. But then again even the papers only write about the death of the “fraudulent detective“ not mentioning anything about Moriarty or Richard Brooks death.  Why not? Wouldn't this cause even more drama? “Fraudulent Detective kills”    (or forces man to commit suicide). More drama means more readers/viewers so why not mention anything about it? Unless there is nothing to report about it since no body was found. Good you might say maybe Moriarty‘s men just took the body after Sherlock jumped but then how did Lestrade and Anderson knew he was dead? (Or was it just a ridiculous assumption of Anderson that Moriarty was dead? Well that would be a big coincidence.) Or maybe Mycroft‘s men took it and told Scotland Yard but why not make it public then? Or maybe really noone (except for Sherlock and Mycroft) knew about his death at this point? (Wouldn't Mycroft check for Richard Brook then?)  Wouldn't the reporters wanna interview Brook then? About this traumatic event he got pulled in? Drama is good not only for the press but also for an actor. Brook would love to get attention in this case wouldn't he? Wouldn't...you know Kitty notice Richard was gone and report on that if he was really dead? Wouldn't it be strange that Brook suddenly stops acting? Well we don't really get any information so from this (admitted mess) I just conclude that simply no body was found. (If you can explain this situation otherwise you are very welcomed to do so.) And you know this is really funny because a certain someone himself said that it can only mean one thing in a detective show when there is no body (looking at you Mr. Moffat) namely that the victim survived. (I suppose you could also explain everything if it indeed was twins this way: Moriarty is dead and Brook is with Kitty. But I personally am not really convinced by this. Not because Sherlock said it‘s never twins but think about it: How big is the probability for both of them beeing amazing actors? This theory that Moriarty has a twin brother is quite popular. A main argument for this is how Moriarty is left handed while Brook appears to be right handed. Well First of all he can just be ambidextrous and second Jim from IT also mainly used his right hand in the scene he was in. And the creators stated first it was planned for Moriarty to only appear in this scene as Jim from IT so it definitely is Moriarty. Or do you think Moriarty would want his twin brother to meet Sherlock? That would miss the point. Moriarty is fascinated or rather obsessed with Sherlock that‘s why he wanted to meet him. Also if you watch closely you can see how he grins when leaving turning away from Molly. His (probably nonexsistent) twin brother wouldn't have any reason to do so. So we know he is quite good at acting/manipulating. Also if you think about it it is the exact same strategy: He finds a person that is useful to him, wins their trust and gets into a relationship with them to be able to get what he wants with their help. The exact same thing he did with Molly he now did with Kitty. So that underlines that it indeed was him and not a twin brother. Also wouldn‘t a twin brother...you know...ruin the joke of the name “Richard Brook”? Anyway after faking his death he probably just stayed with Kitty and then broke up with her/left her after the situation calmed down again.)

(4) Ah yes now on to my favourite part: Season four. What do we get to know in season four? Right! EVERYTHING WAS PLANNED! So Moriarty knew(/hoped) Sherlock wouldn't die there and he also probably knew he had to fake his death because otherwise Sherlock couldn't fake his. So he had way more than enough time to plan how he is going to do it. Why don't we deal with why Moriarty killed himself now. The obvious answer in season two is that he kills himself so Sherlock has to jump and Moriarty beats him this way. Some may say he hadn't any other choice which I don't agree with. If there was a code to stop the killers then there also was one to make the killers shoot the victims immediately. Moriarty could have just counted from 5 downward and if Sherlock didn't jump in that time he would just give the command to kill John, Mrs. Hudson and Lestrade. I mean what did he had to be afraid of? Beeing killed by Sherlock? Now that wouldn't make any sense would it if he decided to kill himself instead anyway? (Also it totally makes a lot of sense for Moriarty to squeak afraid when Sherlock holds him over the edge. That totally is what a person indifferent of life or without any future plans would do.) So you might be asking yourself why he would go as far as to make Sherlock believe he is dead especially when he knew Sherlock would survive the fall anyway? Why the struggle? Well that‘s simple. (That‘s the final problem: Staying alive.) He is playing a game. In case you didn't notice Sherlock played dumb/clueless in season 2 episode 3 with not only Moriarty but everyone around him since he couldn't be sure when Moriarty listens and wanted to have the upper hand in their little game. But everything Moriarty said on the rooftop was an act as well and if that is really the case he is not simply a good but a BRILLIANT actor.He had the upper hand all the time no matter what Sherlock did but he wanted Sherlock to believe that he is dead so Sherlock would feel he was superior over Moriarty. Great minds think alike. Also while yes of course Moriarty would be crazy enough to kill himself you can not tell me he wouldn't want to see Sherlock play with his sister, to see him struggle and fail. I mean his whole life purpose since he found Sherlock was to beat him so you're telling me he wouldn't wanna be there when what he has worked for finally happens? (I mean come on: he even paid over 30 million pounds in season one just to get Sherlock OUT to play and now he is fine with not seeing the ending? Why not watching Sherlock ‘fall‘? It is no secret he is OBSESSED with Sherlock.). He could still have killed himself afterwards. Also does he really trust Eurus THAT much? Okay so now you might ask why he didn't show himself in season four then. (No rush.) Patience is key my friend. (One last not very convincing thing in season four I just want to throw in: In one of Moriarty‘s recordings in Sherrinford in which he immitates a clock he stops after Sherlock screams. I guess it could be a coincidence but regarding none of the other recordings stopped showing only a quietly at the camera starring Moriarty it must be a gigantic one.)

So now if you think I am done then think again and get ready for the unstructured part of my little essay. (Yes even more unstructured than everything before.) Here follows other short information about Moriarty and clues why he is still alive from the whole show in no special order:

(- I will start with one not very convincing one you might actually have already known since you are on tumblr. The lyrics of the song “Who you really are” which plays at the end of episode three of season four repeatedly states:         “Moriarty is alive”. While I believe it probably somehow is possible to change the lyrics for anyone I don't really get why anyone would wanna do this unless it is official or someone is just trolling. Or both.)

-Moriarty is soo changeable

-Moriarty is a good hacker

(-What is this strange “Surprise, you didn't think I'd just dissappear did you?”-clip that was played after season three I believe? If it is supposed to be just one of the clips Moriarty filmed for Eurus why is the background different? I think there are actually clips of him with three different backgrounds? Why? Too much to shoot in one day? If you have any thoughts on this please let me now.)

-Contrary to some others I don't believe Moriarty is just Eurus puppet. I don't see any need for that. Eurus is just Moriartys client like many others on the show. They both have the same goal. Eurus actually was so interested in him because she noticed his interest in Sherlock so it is not that everything from the beginning was Eurus‘ brilliant puppet show. If any then it was him who used her but I don't want to dive into this topic now.

-Moriarty‘s problem is that he is supposedly the best and everyone else around him is boring and can't get to him. He is lonely and depressed. But why would he still want to kill himself after meeting Eurus?                                                     Isn't she interesting enough? Or did he still think Sherlock would beat her too? But wouldn't there then again be a point in living to beat Sherlock or kill him like he promised in season one?

-In the special “The abominable bride” I think Sherlock isn't looking after the answer to the question how Moriarty killed himself rather than why he did it.   And the Moriarty in his head turns around showing him the hole in his head asking something like if it was very obvious and saying maybe he just needs a Good back comb. Back comb. Comeback. Sherlock concludes in this moment that Moriarty faked killing himself to have a good comeback. So he actually does know now that Moriarty isn't dead.

-Moriarty IS the main villain/antagonist of the show. Even after his supposed death in season 2 he still reappears or gets mentioned in most of the other episodes and even at the end with Eurus. Why would a writer do that if it was pointless? I don't think they would want degrade him if Andrew Scott‘s amazing performance even made them rewrite the script to have more Moriarty. Mister Gatiss and Mister Moffat are the real Moriarty fanboys here. They just build up tension very slowly while also getting the attention mostly off him for now. Moriarty is Sherlock‘s equal. His shadow. So he SHOULD be endgame. It is simply impossible to create a bigger villain now since he reappeared in all the seasons until now. Unless the writers plan to write at least 5 more seasons of course.

-In season four Eurus tells Sherlock Moriarty wasn't interested in living but in the impact he would have by dying. But does he really trusts her so much?              Is he really okay with gifting her his favourite toy? Or is he maybe just using her as he does with everybody else? Maybe she isn't lying but simply  doesn't know he is still alive.

-You might say: “But Sherlock clearly says that Moriarty is dead. Especially after the special.” Well yes he does. But (1.) he was on drugs. (2.) he really needs to believe (or rather not really Sherlock but the audience) that Moriarty is dead. Otherwise his (anticipated) comeback would be too predictable and boring. (3.) Sherlock isn't always right but I admit he is most of the time so most importantly (4.) he still keeps playing. The game isn't over yet and he needs to play safe. He keeps on playing dumb/clueless like he did in “The Reichenbachfall” where he even lied to John about Moriarty not touching or writing anything so Moriarty feels superior. We never get the IOU conclusion he worked on all the time. He kept everybody including us clueless just as he does now in season 4 to have the upper hand again or at least not to be in disadvantage.

-Then you also might say something like: “But this isn't like in the Canon.” Ah yes. The Canon. (1.) Remind me again where does it say this in the Canon? Before the secret, psycho genius sister held captive in a maximum security prison on a secluded island or after?...You get the point? (2.) Originally even Sherlock should be dead in the Canon (Which I actually think might happen in season five). (3.) It isn't even against the Canon since in the Canon Moriarty dies in “The final problem” and not in “The Reichenbach Falls”. Him dying in season two would actually be more against the Canon.

(-Since Mycroft was with Eurus alone before and isn't really on her side maybe he actually is controlled by her too without knowing so? Maybe he unknowingly even helped Moriarty? But this seems rather unrealistic. Just a thought.)

-Now something I don't really get: Eurus said apparently she was Moriarty‘s revenge on Sherlock. His revenge for what? Killing himself for no real reason? That seems not very smart. Beeing his distraction in the big boring world? Or maybe they have a history we don't know of? It seems quite possible. If Sherlock was able to delete Eurus from his mind why couldn't he have done the same thing with Moriarty?

-Why does Eurus mention Moriarty has a brother who was a station master? Why was he jealous of him? Why WAS he a station master? Is he dead now or does he just got a different job if he isn't one anymore? Why is there all this train imagery in Moriarty‘s clips? Why is that important at all? Is this foreshadowing, simple taunting or am I missing something completely? (The last thing at the end of season four we see is Sherlock and John running out of a train station but I don't know if that has really anything to do with that.)

-Fight me on this one but the ending is too perfect. I didn't buy it for one second. I mean character development and friends bla bla but you want to tell me Sherlock suddenly wouldn't be bored without Moriarty? Sure the normal cases will keep him occupied for some time but eventually sooner or later they will just bore him again, don't you agree? You can't “cure” a sociopath. And without the right stimulation he might become the “bad” guy himself or simply die of boredom.

-Moriarty WANTS Sherlock dead. Just in a slow fun way. On John‘s blog Moriarty even wonders how Sherlock‘s skull would look like on his wall. He is obsessed obviously.

-Don't get me wrong I am not sad or mad about the fact Moriarty is supposedly dead. But rather on HOW he died. His death should be something big something grandiose. I am talking a whole city exploding why fireworks spell out his name -grandious. (Well maybe not that extra but you get the point.) I refuse to believe he would be fine dying in such a simple way without the world even knowing his name. Come on. It‘s “I-dance-while-stealing-the-crown-jewels-Moriarty” not “Jim-from-IT”. If he is still alive I am sure he will die in the last season but in a more exciting way.

(-While trying to get out the information if he really has a sister out of Mycroft Sherlock let's one if them say: “Nothing is impossible.”)

-Let‘s talk about my favourite clue at the end now because I am tired. Do you remember a certain little conversation Sherlock and Moriarty had when evil queen Moriarty came to visit and dishonored Sherlock‘s apple? Let me remind you:

JIM: You know when he was on his death bed, Bach, he heard his son at the piano playing one of his pieces. The boy stopped before he got to the end ... SHERLOCK: ... and the dying man jumped out of his bed, ran straight to the piano and finished it. JIM: Couldn’t cope with an unfinished melody. SHERLOCK: Neither can you. That’s why you’ve come.

Does any bell ring with you?  Sherlock is playing Moriarty‘s game: The death of Sherlock. But he doesn't play it to the end. So Moriarty will return to finish it. After all as Sherlock says Moriarty can't cope with an unfinished melody so he wouldn't die before finishing it.

All that beeing said I still also wouldn't be surprised (just disappointed because I feel Moriarty is the only one who is a match for Sherlock and could do so much more entertaining things.) if he really was dead. Because after all this is only fiction. In fiction there are often many logical explanation for events but only the ones the writers decided on will be the truth. (Unless you guys are up to rioting. Anyone has their adresses? Just kidding of course for legal reasons. I think they do a really good job with the show and while I must say I hate liars I respect artists. Imagine they would just tell us everything that would happen from the beginning. That would be boring. Looking forward to season five. I am sure we will get it before 2050. :))

So thanks to coming to my TED-talk. If you have any other helpful information I have missed, questions, opinions on this, criticism or anything else feel free to write me. And please tell me if you have really read to the end. I am curious if anyone has. :)

(Sorry for grammar mistakes and such. It has been a while since I wrote this much in English.)

#moriarty theory #moriarty #sherlock #moriarty is alive #sherlock season 5

[cookiedoughmeagain]

Haven DVD Commentaries - 5.07: Nowhere Man

Commentary with Brian Millikin (writer for the episode) and Nick Parker (writer of the companion episode 5.08).

I love these two and their commentaries so much because they talk a LOT and they have many things to say. Which is awesome, if sometimes hard to capture in text, so this is a mixture of direct quotes and paraphrasing.[My comments in square brackets]

BM: It’s kind of a two-parter, these two episodes, maybe a little bit less than some of our other two-parters of the season. That was something we set out to do.

NP: Yeah, not to the same extent as 5.05 and 5.06, but there is a lot - the Trouble carries on through both episodes, and that was an edict we had going into the season.

BM: We really wanted there to be a hard ending to a couple stories in this episode, and in the next one. So, Audrey gets to a place at the end of this one, and so do Mara and Duke, and everyone else. And this is the first episode of the season where we have Audrey Parker back. I was excited to do this because last season I wrote the episode just like it - ‘The New Girl’ - it was one of my favourite ones I did. And it seemed like all episode long it was Lexie who had come out of the Barn, but in reality it was actually Audrey. But it was fun because it was kind of like a new pilot. And then this one is not like a pilot, it was much different because Audrey had been around - even though she wasn’t in control of her body she was there to witness what Mara was doing. Which was something I think we were really attracted to …

NP: I agree

BM: … the idea that she feels a certain culpability or responsibility because she was in the back seat watching what Mara was doing.

NP: She was there, inside.

BM: Yeah and it’s a stark contrast to what we’ve done before.

BM: So this scene [the opening scene with Audrey Nathan and Duke on the Rouge] we talked about all these different versions of starting right on the heels of the previous episode. As it is I think it’s maybe an hour later, two hours later. Which is a little bit weird if you think about it. It means that episode 7 and 8 really take place within …

NP: 5, 6, 7 and 8 all take place within about 12 hours.

BM: This entire season takes place over the course of about 3 days.

NP: Yep. And there were also several different versions of this opening scene where they’re discussing the split and what to do with Mara, and I remember one which was pretty interesting where we talked about it just being Nathan and Audrey having this conversation on their own, and Duke being separate from it.

BM: Yeah, but we kind of wanted it to be the three amigos here. And Emily did a great job of playing the, almost PTSD that she has a little bit; she’s been through hell. And we had a version of this too where a lot of the scene was about them testing to make sure that she was really Audrey. But that just felt kind of unnecessary; first of all we knew that she was really Audrey, and we felt like the audience would too. So we just flew past it and assumed that she is. And the most important thing for us was that they don’t know what happened at the end of the last episode, they’re just winging it.

[As Duke goes to see Mara in the hold] NP: I love that Duke just has basically a prison cell in his boat, like always ready to go.

BM: It’s the biggest hold of a boat I’ve ever seen. I think it’s wider than the boat itself, the actual boat, but it looks great.

NP: The hold of his boat is bigger than his bedroom.

BM: But I love the set, and more than that, I love the two of them in here. Remember from the very first day of the season we always knew we were going to get to this point right here; episode 7, half way through with Audrey and Mara split. And we kept it to something of a surprise, and I think a lot of people thought it was just going to be Mara all season long and then maybe in the season finale it would be Audrey, or that at some point maybe Audrey would claim her body back. But we had always wanted to have both; to have our cake and eat it too. And we just thought it was more interesting for the story that way.

NP: And I think we decided to develop it even more and push it even further because Emily is so, so good as Mara.

BM: Absolutely.

NP: We were like; we’re going to give her as much screen time as we can.

BM: I know we all expected her to be good as Mara - I mean she’s always great as Audrey, and she really brings something to Sarah and Lexie. So we expected her to be good - but I think she was even better than we had anticipated. We love her as Mara.

NP: Yeah, you can just see her having fun in the role. She’s enjoying getting to stretch her legs a little bit, and it shows.

BM: I think the other actors had fun with it too; enjoying playing off of her as Mara. I mean, how many times have Eric Balfour and Emily Rose been in the same room together, and now they’re in the same room together, but it’s not Audrey. It’s someone else entirely. In fact she’s closer to Hannibal Lecter than anything else. That was sort of the impetus for all this stuff with her in the hold of the boat; yes it’s easier to shoot [all in the one set], but alse we thought it was dramatically interesting to see what they would do with it. It makes sense to keep Mara prisoner, at least for now just to figure out what to do next, and then it’s like well; this is great, we’ve got Mara being held in prison on Duke’s boat and Duke has now become her jailer. And that interaction between the two of them gave us so much.

NP: Yeah and particularly with what they’re discussing in this scene with the unknowing of what the split means and how it works, whether Audrey is connected to Mara. Because it’s all uncharted territory.

BM: She said it right there [as Duke’s leaving]. That was the thing that was most interesting to me about it, was the idea that she’s a prisoner, but she is actually in control. Or at least that’s what she says; she claims to be holding all the cards and to know what’s going on. And whether she does or not doesn’t really matter, because they definitely don’t. And she might. So that power interplay was something that we haven’t been able to do in the show before, and when you get to the fifth season of a show I think you’re just looking for these interesting new things you can try.

NP: And because we’re in the fifth season now I think we get to live with the characters a lot more.

BM: Sure.

[As we see Audrey and Nathan in bed together] NP: This is probably a lot of fans favourite scene. We don’t get to see these two actually be together that much. Stuff’s always so crazy in Haven that they never really get to just be together in bed and be together as a couple.

BM: No, and it’s sad because here we’ve got an actual tender scene between Nathan and Audrey and guess what - work calls. Because it just does.

NP: Every time.

BM: They don’t get a lot of time to just hang out and be with each other.

NP: I like that line; “Case Face”.

BM: I think I took that from the fact that we always talk, here and on other shows too, about having Writer Face. When you’re off on script or an outline or working on an episode. You know, you still come in to have lunch with the other writers, or you’re still in the hallways and at the coffee machine, but you’re not really there.

NP: You’re basically a phantom.

BM: With this distant look in your eyes as you try to figure out … how are they going to get out of it in act four if they don’t have a gun … or whatever. We always call it Writer Face, so Case Face was from that. I think I ripped off, everybody.

NP: Yeah. And that’s fine. That’s what good writers do, right?

BM: But the other important thing in this scene - there were some versions where we had it in that first scene but that just felt like too much  - is Nathan revealing that he can’t feel her any more. Which leads him to believe (correctly) that she is no longer the same; she’s not immune to the Troubles any more. Something is different about her. And it’s such a big deal that we decided, I think correctly, to put it in this scene between the two of them. Because it’s big deal obviously, for the two of them. At the same time, he says it doesn’t matter to him and I think we all believed that. You know, what would it be like if when he realised he couldn’t feel her he wasn’t in love with her any more?

NP: Yeah, that was something we talked about a lot.

BM: As someone who can’t feel anyone- yes he could feel her and that might have been one of the things that maybe got him started

NP: Yeah.

BM: But it’s certainly not where he is now. Not any more.

NP: Yeah.

BM: And I think maybe it spoke highly of their relationship that he believes it doesn’t really matter. Although I do think that it matters to her.

NP: Of coure.

BM: But maybe less to him. And he’s also just got her back. I don’t think there’s any version where he wouldn’t have wanted to be with her anymore just because he couldn’t feel her.

NP: No, I agree. But this lack of immunity after living with it for so long, now finding out that she isn’t, it throws her off her game which I think is an interesting dynamic in this episode. She has to live in that reality. And he’s telling her it’s all fine, that they’re going to make it. But you can see her having some self doubt.

BM: Absolutely. And we liked the emotion of that and having to grapple with that because it was a way for them to express some of the … I guess the best word for it is still PTSD of what they’ve gone through with the Mara situation. What they’re still going through. Without it being all about that. It was a microcosm of the fact that they’re sort of pawns in a larger game that they’re not in control of necessarily.

NP: Yep. Oh there’s Kirsty.

BM: Yes, Kirsty Hinchcliffe, Lucas Bryant’s wife.

NP: Officer Rebecca Rafferty.

BM: Yeah. We wanted to put her in this scene because we very much wanted her to be in the next scene she shows up in. And she’s also super-useful here, along with this townperson they meet, in establishing that people aren’t necessarily warm to the idea of Audrey being back. After what they’ve been through with Mara. Mara killed a bunch of people, she was running around causing all kinds of problems, and for the people who are in the know (like Rafferty) even they are probably a little reluctant to necessarily throw their arms around Audrey and trust her again.

NP: Yeah and I think that’s something we’ve got to explore in the second half of season five, is that, so much crazy stuff happens in Haven, all the time. So what do people know and who knows what? We talk about it in the room all the time but it’s not fully explored, because we do so much with our characters. And it is something we got to do a little bit more [5b] because things got so crazy, is how people actually react to it and how do they talk to our characters about it.

BM: Yeah, it was kind of a point of emphasis coming into the season for Matt McGuinness and Gabrielle Stanton, our show runners, was to live in the reality just a little bit more and show how people would really react to some of this stuff. And having a lot of these two-parter episodes where the case of the week extends into the next episode, which allows us just a little bit more real estate to do that kind of thing.

NP: Yeah, just to live in it. This is the most lively farmers’ market.

BM: Absolutely. Not the first time we’ve seen this farmers’ market. We were here in episode, er, four of the first season; Consumed.

NP: Oh yeah. It is so crowded there.

[As Nathan talks to Reggies] BM: Ah, this is Dylan Taylor as Reggie. And we totally stole the name from True Detective which had aired a few months before we shot this episode.

NP: We are huge fans of True Detective.

BM: And we just needed to give some flavour, and a voice to the character, and so we thought, let’s write him a bit like Reggie Ledoux.

[Having never watched True Detective, I looked Reggie Ledoux up; the fandom.com wiki describes him as a “brutal and vile drug dealer” that manufactures meth for a violent criminal biker gang, and an “accomplice and right-hand man” of a serial-killer. Yikes.]

BM: So we called him Reggie and had always intended on changing it but the name had this kind of blue-collar gritty quality and that’s who the character was. Enough that we wrote in that he has a bit of a Southern drawl, or this back-water drawl.

NP: I think back water. He brought the Southern to it, it was nice.

BM: And he really went for it and it totally worked. But we got a call from set on the first day he was there - he’s a great actor, he’s done a load of stuff, he didn’t audition, he didn’t have to, we were lucky to get him - so he shows up and he’s doing this accent and we get a call from the Producer on set. And she’s saying; I don’t know if we have a problem, but Dylan is doing an accent. And we said; Well check the script, it’s in there, it’s going to be great. And we wound up really enjoying his performance, he’s fantastic. Our showrunner Matt, was upset that he meets an untimely end in the next episode because he wanted us to bring Reggie back. He told us not to kill him but we’d already shot that scene where he dies.

NP: Matt wanted Reggie to be the new Guard back guy. Which is a role we’ve kind of rolled from character to character for production reasons in a lot of ways. But Reggie was so good that we were wondering how we could have him come back and be the Guard bad guy.

[The scene where Nathan gets hit by the Trouble] BM: So something bad is about to happen to Nathan. Which was always the plan for the episode; this has actually been in the works for a long time. We referred to this story as Ghost Nathan. Going back to the first season we had a bank of episodes [that we’d like to do]. And a lot of them were ones that we could never produce, but one of them was a ghost one where we figured we could have someone walking through walls and stuff. And I - maybe it’s because of my unabashed love for the movie Ghost - but I always thought we could do a Ghost Nathan episode. And we never had anything we could do with it. It was one of those things you’d pull it out if it worked for the episode. And it did work for this one. Because we needed the Trouble in this episode to do a few things for us. First of all it works because Lucas Bryant is great at selling the ghost of it all. He’s standing in this room with Kirsty, his wife, and she has to ignore him and he has to sell it - they both do. The best special effect in the episode is not people walking through walls or him sticking his hand through the phone, the best effect is the performance. And it’s not an easy thing; everyone ignoring him and him acting like they can’t see him.

NP: Well yeah and in that scene it was just him there and her ignoring him the entire time, but there’s several scenes where we had to shoot two versions; one with Lucas and one without, and then patch them together.

BM: Yeah even this scene [Duke and Audrey looking at Nathan’s shadow on the floor] there are a couple of wide shots where Nathan’s not in it. WhichI think our producers were not super-happy about because it definitely added to the load that we had to shoot. But Audrey and Nathan have been separated for, what six episodes this season, and they’ve just got back together again. And there was a version where we could have gone with a story where they were the power team back together again. But we liked the idea of a bit of a role reversal. That she would be thrust into this position of trying to get him back. And he’s trying to get back to her. And what that did for their characters and for so many other story lines, particularly the other big thing that we had to deal with in this episode that she’s not immune to the Troubles. So we wanted to go with a Trouble that really played to that. So the idea that she can’t see him now, when any other episode before this one she would have been able to. She would have been able to see him if she was immune and it would have blown up the episode. So this was the perfect time to do it, in an episode where, for the first time ever, Audrey is not immune to the Troubles.

NP: And an important detail is that right now, they don’t know what this Trouble is, so she doesn’t know where he is. The supposition is that he’s dead, and we’ve had dead Nathan before but always found ways to bring him back. But because of the way this Trouble works there’s no body, no nothing, so they have no way to bring him back.

BM: And that scene we just saw [Duke and Audrey finding Nathan’s shadow on the floor] there were versions of it that went a lot further in that direction. Where Duke was basically talking about the idea that it looks like Nathan is dead.

NP: Yeah, he’s gone.

BM: And Audrey was fighting back against him. And it was really, really heavy. And we eventually pulled back on it, I think correctly, because Matt and Gab felt that it was just too sad. We did still play with it a little with Duke, he’s still much closer than Audrey is to believing that the worst has happened. And that makes sense because Duke is not quite as romantic, he’s a little bit more of a realist.

NP: Yep.

BM: And he’s already been through a bunch of bad shit already. And he’s beginning to come around to the idea that he’s just lost Nathan; another punch in the series of punches he’s been taking. But Audrey clings a little bit longer. We wanted her to escalate her anger over the course of the episode as she’s starting to consider that it could be maybe legit. But we definitely pulled back on the two of them holding each other and mourning his loss. Just yet.

NP: Yeah, it will grow.

BM: So the other thing we needed to do in this episode, again talking about the realism of it all, is that we felt like it couldn’t be easy for Audrey to be Audrey again, not with everything that Mara had done. And the best way for us to show that was to have actually the Guard be the main threat in this episode. The case of the week is sort of an issue, but the real threat in this episode ends up being, what is the Guard going to do not understanding the Mara/Audrey situation of it all.

NP: Yeah and just having the Guard as the threat is something we talked about for so long at different times. And this was a good way of escalating it at the right time, with Mara having been the threat that she was for so long, and Dwight being out of town. We did not have the wonderful Adam Copeland for these two episodes, so he’s gone and the Guard is doing their own thing in his absence.

BM: Yeah it wasn’t our choice, really, to have no Adam Copeland in this episode. It was just by his schedule, due to his contract, we were just not going to have him for this episode or the next one. So we kind of got stuck with no Adam, but it wound up really working for the story because I don’t think that the Guard threat could have played as well, with them going off the handle, with him around. So it actually wound up being a story that works because Adam’s gone. It’s almost about the fact that he is gone.

NP: This actor is great, who plays Glen.

BM: Yes, his name is Dylan Trowbridge.

NP: Glen named after Glen Holler/Holland [not sure of the spelling]

BM: Our friend Glen. His last name, Andros, is a Stephen King reference. Nick Andros was the deaf character from The Stand.

NP: Perfect. Got to work in those Stephen King references.

[As Audrey arrives at the farmers’ market] BM: Now, Amy the photographer who Audrey is about to talk to is, the Troubled person of the episode. So we had to plant her in the background when we were here a while ago, and now she’s here too. Because we needed the logic to work in the background. And that’s why there’s also some dialogue here about how she had gone home because the Trouble works when she prints out the photo, when she makes the photo final, the way a painter would finish a painting or whatever. So we had established that she had not been here all day but had gone home and printed some of the photos. She must have liked the looks of Nathan. And then here we have Audrey tell her to send her some pictures and she’s got the hard copies in the next episode. So we imagine that right now, Amy is going home, printing out all the photos she has of Reggie. But maybe her printer is out of ink,

NP: Or it takes her a while to get home.

BM: And then she prints it out of course, the second that Audrey has Reggie at gunpoint and so he disappears.

[As Nathan walks up to the crying woman in the graveyard] NP: Oh remember the fun we had coming up with what this woman is going to say?

BM: Oh my gosh yes. We had always intended there to be a bit of a horror movie scare there. Totally helped by the fact that Rob Lieberman, our director for this episode and the next (as well as other Haven episodes) has a ton of experience in that department. He did Fire In The Sky, super-scary movie. And he’s great. So he totally leaned into it. You can even see here [where Nathan’s talking to the ‘ghosts’] all these interesting canted angles and stuff it just feels a little bit moodier and scarier than it otherwise could. Because if you really look at it, it’s a beautiful day. It would have been great if this was nighttime but we couldn’t shoot any of these scenes at night.

NP: And Chris Masterson does a great job here as Morgan, does an incredible job as the ghost guide, the greeting committe, giving Nathan the rundown on how everything operates. And functionally for the logic of the story it’s really important because of what he’s saying about crossing over as your residual self image. Which is stuff that plays to important plot points later in this episode and the next one.

BM: Especially in your episode. This scene was exposition heavy, it was kind of a bear trying to make it as conversational as possible.

NP: But Chris sells it.

BM: He totally does. But yeah a lot of the stuff that Morgan talks about here about the theories of how it works is his understanding, but his understanding is not correct. But it’s what we have to go with for the time being.

NP: Yeah everything he says is true from his point of view, but his understanding is not correct.

BM: Yeah we were lucky to get Chris for this episode. We had his brother, Danny Masterson, last season in your episode 411. He was one of the two Darkside Seekers. The other Darkside Seeker, Kris Lemche, is about to appear in the next episode.

[As we flash back to Nathan talking to Garland’s ghost] BM: Ooh the flashback. In the exact same cemetery. I always wonder why that says Rufus P. Parker there [on the gravestone between Nathan and Garland]. The Parker kind of threw me off.

[Personally I think it says Barker, but it’s an interesting comment anyway:)]

BM: But we’ve got a bunch of flashbacks, little quick ones like that over the course of the season. And it was sort of by design, not knowing, and still not knowing frankly, whether this would be the last season of the show or not. So just in case it was, we sort of wanted to hearken back to previous seasons before and try to connect things a little bit better. And even just seeing what our characters looked like a couple of years ago has a little bit of an emotional whallop to it.

[As Nathan watches Duke frustratedly flicking through the Crocker journal] BM: So we’re coming up on the twist here at the end of this third act that I used to sell the episode. Because the way that it works on our show, and most shows, is that you’ve got the roadmap of the season (the big things that need to happen), this one we knew this was the first one with Audrey and Mara split, and Mara in the hold of the boat. And we didn’t know a ton else about what it was going to be. We knew that we were going to start pushing Mara and Duke’s relationship as they get to know each other and see eye to eye a little bit more, and then in episode 8 a little bit more, and in episode 9 a little bit more. But that was kind of it.

NP: Episodes 7 and 8 to a large extent were about finishing up the story lines from the first half of the season, and this was platforming for everything that was going to happen in the back end.

BM: So we knew that we needed a big Trouble that would take up these two episodes, and we needed it to help us tell some stories about our characters. But the way that we sold this one with the ghost of it all was basically that - from the get-go from pitching it to our show runners and everybody - was that at the half way point of the episode, ghost!Nathan and Duke are in here and they’re talking to Mara, and Duke leaves, and then she reveals that she can see Nathan. And that was the turning point of the episode. If we’ve done our jobs well enough maybe not everyone saw it coming, I think that a good amount of people probably did see it coming. But it helped us in a lot of ways, it really turned the screws on the Mara story really quickly.

NP: Yep.

BM: Now she’s even more in control because she’s the only person who can see Nathan. And that tells us that Nathan’s not really dead of course. And it tells Nathan that he’s the victim of a Trouble. But it also helped us tell a story about the fact that Mara’s immune to the Troubles and Audrey is not. Which was the big thing that we needed to tackle. And what better way to do it than the fact that Audrey can’t see Nathan and the only person who can, is Mara.

NP: That’s it.

BM: So once we had that as the middle twist of the episode, everyone was on board. There was no going back then.

NP: And the back half of that is something maybe we’ll talk about more in 508 but, because Mara is immune and can see him, how does Audrey use her lack of immunity to her benefit.

BM: Absolutely. The end point of this episode is really about Audrey bottoming out a little bit. We wanted to get her to a place where she kind of has to confess that she is not who she once was, and she maybe can’t do this anymore because she’s lost her, superpower (for lack of a better term). And then the next episode is where she gets her groove back to some extent, and realises that it’s not about her immunity, it’s about whatever she does with whatever she has at her disposal. And she ends up using her lack of immunity to her advantage. So this episode was sort of the Empire Strikes Back, then you’ve got the Return of the Jedi.

NP *sounding doubtful* Well…

BM: Don’t think about it.

NP: Oh there’s Reggie . And I love the other backup Guard member who looks very much like Jordan McKee from previous seasons.

BM: She looks just like her.

[Me: *squints doubtfully at the screen*]

BM: Her name is Justine [I can’t catch the surname]. She has worked on the show in the past and she’s great. She had some lines at some point in time. And a name, I feel like her characters’ name was Riley. And then it ended getting cut because there was just too much going on in the episode and too many people. I should also say while we’re talking about the Guard, that Mitchell, who is coming back to our show, was in episodes three and four. He was a bit of a late addition to those; we were trying to bring back as a returning Guardsman, the guy from episode 403, Bad Blood, but he wasn’t available. So we created a new Guardsman, as Mitchell. And then we brought him back for this episode which was great.

NP: We just needed to have someone with some animosity towards Nathan and the police department who was a more militant member of the Guard.

BM: Absolutely. And we actually tried to bring Mitchell back a couple episodes from now and then he wasn’t available. So we had to go with another person, so it was a bit of a case of musical chairs of Guard members.

[Nathan talking to the two ‘ghosts’ in the graveyard] NP: And Nathan here is revealing the truth.

BM: Yeah. It’s kind of classic. We had been a little bit worried that in the previous acts there was really just that one stretch of 10 minutes where Nathan thinks he’s dead. And no one wanted him to lose his drive, because he should always be trying to figure out what’s going on. But now that he knows that he’s the victim of a Trouble, he’s in Nathan mode. And is going to do whatever he can.

NP: He’s got Case Face now.

BM: Absolutely. But again a lot of this and Morgan’s attitude on hearing what Nathan has to say, pays off more in the next episode. It’s laying the groundwork for the fact that maybe not everyone wants to go back. It’s a little of the insitutionalised thing; a bit of a Shawshank Redemtion thing here that if you get used to living this way maybe you don’t want to go back. Although as we’ll discover in 508, Morgan has a pretty good reason for not wanting to go back.

NP: A very good, if selfish, reason.

BM: Yeah, but you can’t blame him. And that’s what you’re looking for in your motivation for a bad guy. Where when you find out why they’re doing what they’re doing you feel like you’d probably do the same thing.

[As Audrey is pointing her gun at Reggie] BM: Reggie here is a bit lighter on motivation. He’s just a bad guy. But you don’t really stop to think about it because Dylan is so good.

NP: He just sells it.

BM: But even here, his little speech here was important to me to get his POV across a little bit. Which, from his stand point, Audrey has caused all of this to happen, which she did. And then she was Mara, and now she says she’s Audrey but she can’t be trusted; bad things are happening. So why should he listen to her? I put myself in Reggie’s shoes and realised that if the show was about the Guard, Audrey and Nathan would be the bad guys.

NP: Yeah. I also love the aspect of that scene there where Reggie is down on his knees at the mercy of Audrey, much like in his final scene in True Detective, on his knees at the mercy of someone there.

BM: Yeah, totally ripped that off too.

NP: I think there was an earlier version of the script where Nathan runs out of the van there and it drives through him.

*Both being amused at the intense level of concentration on Nathan’s face as he watches Bishop tap the security code into the door*

BM: What you don’t see, is that you have to imagine that in his head for the rest of this scene Nathan is just thinking to himself like; 1283. 1283. Gotta remember the code. 1283. That is why we had it be a four-digit code because if it was six it would be harder to remember. But I love the look of Guard HQ here. Remember Rob Lieberman was totally responsible for it. He mentioned to us when we were on the phone to us, he said; I’m going out on a limb here but I’m thinking like the movie Children of Men. And we were both like; Could not love Children of Men more, please do it.

NP: Such a moody and gritty feel.

BM: But if you recognise a bit of the layout and architecture of the hallway we just saw and the long room here [where Mitchell has Audrey tied to a chair in front of the desk that Bishop’s Trouble disintergrates], this is actually the same building that we used the interior of for the Barn at the end of season three and briefly in season four. I think this is the second floor of that building. The first floor is painted all white, every inch of it, because it was the Barn. And up here it’s the exact same layout but now it’s Guard HQ.

BM: Now poor Bishop.

NP: He has got a rough, rough Trouble

BM: So we imagined that he would have to be one of these people wearing gloves, and that they would have to be these chemical resistant ones because he’s got this acid touch. So then it’s like well he’s going to look silly wearing these giant gloves. Because those gloves are real, they can actually protect against any sort of corrosive acid. So we figured he should be wearing coveralls as well so it kind of matches, so it seems like he’s an industrial type guy. But the actor must have been burning alive because this was the middle of summer in Nova Scotia which means that it was about 90 degrees.

[Nathan talking to Mara again in the hold] BM: So this scene here, in a way is the climax of the episode. At least it was for me. This is where the shit hits the fan. Nathan comes to her with his plan for her to tell Duke what’s happening to Audrey. She says no, and then it’s about getting her to help. And then it all just fell into place; it seemed like the right story to tell about Audrey and Mara. And to be evolving what is Mara’s relationship to them now that she is her own person. Because she’s only going to do what’s in her best interest. And she keeps holding this card over their heads as to whether she’s connected or not. And we went into this season knowing that they weren’t connected, knowing that hurting Mara wasn’t going to hurt Audrey (unlike the thing with William) but that question comprises the entirety of this episode. Because we realised the characters don’t know that. So a lot of this is Duke trying to figure out whether she is or not. And Mara withholding her knowledge. So then we knew that the last beat in this episode would be Mara revealing the truth. Because at that point she doesn’t need them to wonder whether she’s connected or not because she’s got something better, which is that now she knows they need her to help Nathan.

NP: Well and that’s always what her bargaining chip is, that she can’t threaten them with anything, it’s all about the knowledge she possesses.

BM: And the actors all did a great job with this scene. There are takes where Nathan’s there, and when he’s not. But it all really worked. And she is just the right amount of funny in this scene.

NP: And cruel.

BM: Because she’s still enjoying messing with them, and it worked out really well. It really worked out really well. And here, what Eric had to play is realising that Nathan is alive again, but also realising that Audrey’s in Trouble. It’s not as easy as the three of them make it look. But it’s amazing because we have our three leads, they’re back in the same room together, they do this every day for years. But now, she’s the bad guy, Nathan’s a ghost, and Eric has no idea what’s going on. So I was really excited about being able to write a scene - and this is a three or four page scene - with all them in the room together but everything is different from how it usually is.

NP: Yeah, and this was one of the ones that had to be shot twice.

BM: And the other story that we’re telling in this episode is Audrey’s relationship to the town, and them not trusting her, is she lying about who she is, and all this doubt that everyone would have about her, after having lived through the tyranny of Mara for a while. And so the thing that we wanted to do in this scene [as Bishop is dissolving the desk] is kind of to some extent close that story off. It still comes up a bunch of times throughout the season, but she does something here, or could do something here, that proves to them that she is Audrey. She has a kind of I Am Sparticus Moment; I am Audrey Parker. It seemed a little cheesy in the script but Emily totally sells it. And that I Am Audrey Parker moment was an important one for us.

NP: Absolutely.

BM: We started this episode with her kind of in this fetal position trying to grapple with what she is now, finding she’s not immune, what is her identity now. So it felt important to us that she get to a different place by the next episode.

NP: Well yeah because there’s a sense in which her superpower is immunity to the Troubles, but really, on an emotional level, her superpower is her empathy for everybody and understanding what they’re going through. So she’s like; I totally get why you did what you did, so you’re going to be OK. Forgiveness is her thing.

BM: I never noticed that Duke brings Mara a can of food there. That wasn’t in the script. I’ve seen this episode a bunch of times and I never noticed that before, but it makes sense.

[As Mara is cutting her wrist with the chains] BM: We had a bit of an issue here because we knew that we wanted her to cut herself to prove that her and Audrey aren’t connected, but it was only when we were about to start shooting we realised; how is she going to cut herself when she’s chained up? So we had her use one of the chains, and it might be impossible to do in real life, but Emily totally sold it.

NP: Yep, she gets it.

BM: And I love this. We basically get three episodes of Mara in the hold of Duke’s boat. And I love them all. We always thought of it as the Hannibal Lecter scenes and the power play of it between her and Duke, and it really starts to work very well I think in these last two scenes. And super well in episode 8.

NP: It was fun. And I think one of the challenges of this is that we knew she was going to be chained up in the hold, and so the challenge is how do you differentiate each scene, and each episode, and what is the arc for each one? And so we really had to bear down on what they were going to be about.

BM: Well it was kind of a story unto itself, and here she tells us just a little bit that she’s actually affected by it, when she admits that she liked it when they said they needed her. Is she telling the truth, is she not - Duke doesn’t pay her any mind at all and walks out, but what is she thinking, what is she doing? Is she warming to Duke a little bit or does she have some angle that she’s playing - that’s the question we wanted everyone to be asking.

NP: And that’s the question we live in a lot in 508.

[Audrey talking to a ghost!Nathan (kind of) in her apartment] BM: So this scene also just fell into place really naturally. We knew that Nathan’s ghost situation was not going to be resolved at the end of this episode. And we knew that our first Audrey/Nathan scene in that bed over there was this tender scene, and I wanted to get them back in that same room and have them be in the room together but as far apart as possible. And all of the circumstances they have to deal with have kept them apart - again. And so she thinks that he’s there, but doesn’t know for sure that he is. And they’re both great in this scene.

NP: Again credit to both of the actors for selling this, that she’s talking to him but not looking at him.

BM: Yeah I talked to them about it, they really enjoyed doing it because it’s a really heartfelt scene between the two of them and she’s confessing this doubt that she has (and she’s a very confident person) and they’re both there together but she has no idea whether she’s even there or not. And he knows that she can’t hear him. So he’s watching her go through this. And it’s a scene between the two of them that is unlike anything else, in its DNA that we had been able to do before now. So it felt like an opportunity and I think they both felt that way too.

NP: Yep, love this scene.

BM: But we also just wanted them to bottom out a little bit here because then episode 8 is kind of the come back

NP: The Return of the Jedi as you so nicely put it.

BM: Exactly. We unfreeze him from carbonite. We go fight in the forest.

NP: There’s some Ewoks. It’s great.

[Nathan back in the graveyard for the final scene] BM: So this was always the end of the episode, picking up the ghost case of it all. And we always wanted, right on the back of Nathan being confident that he’s safe and he’s going to take care of it, to then come over here and see that his Deputy Glen has been killed. And we always wanted to have this message left for him [“Even ghosts can die”] scrawled on the grave. And we landed on that one pretty quickly because it couldn’t be too long.

NP: And it sets us up nicely for 508.

BM: Thanks for listening everybody, we will see you again for 508.

#haven 5 #haven dvd commentaries #5.07 - Nowhere Man #havensyfy #i always start out intending to summarise more #but it's actually eaiser a lot of the time to just type out what they say rather than stopping to think about how best to describe it #so i don't often manage to condense much #and these guys talk QUICKLY #so there is a lot of stuff here #long post

[crasherfly]

What I’m Up To

Taking a brief pause from my fantasy screenplay to talk a bit about what I’m playing/reading/listening to these days.

VIDYA GAMES

Cities: Skylines- Still working on my shithole city in all its glory. San Cruz has expanded to over 100k residents and in the past week I’ve built a level 3 park, extensive monorail system, and even extensive helicopter pickup lines. It’s still a terrible place to live, but it’s also fun to grapple with the challenges of a desert map. 

Yakuza 0- I’m gonna post this take here, since we’re not on twitter and I’m safe from the mobs- Yakuza 0 is the experience everyone promised me Witcher 3 would be. Thrilling combat, a fascinating game world, and lovely, meaningful side quests. If this sounds like I’m digging at Witcher 3, I promise I’m not. I personally didn’t enjoy that game. But obviously, many, many people did and would disagree with my critiques. That’s totally fine! I’m just saying I’m enjoying Yakuza 0 for merits similar to what I’ve heard in connection with the Witcher franchise- and I could also see people having similar gripes, too! I’ve been on a well documented single player drought over the past couple months. Yakuza 0 finally broke me out of that, and it’s been a thrill. Getting out of the COD grind cycle has been a joy. This is a lovely experience that rewards curiosity by sparking yet more curiosity. I can’t wait to see how it continues to open up. Expect my Twitter account to go on about this for a while.

Mario 64- I have 8 stars! I’m told I have like, 113 more to go, a number which makes me groan.  So far, Mario 64 has felt like an obligation that is occasionally fun. It’s very dated, but it has the DNA that would go on to make later games like Odyssey an absolute joy.  Games like these feel more like an exercise in filling in my gamer history gaps than they do labors of love. Like most retro games, I have a hard time getting into Mario 64 for longer than 20 minutes at a time. So this will likely be a long-running project.

Star Wars: Squadrons- I probably should have known better, but I picked this game up ‘cuz the reviews were decent and the price felt right. Good news is that in the couple of hours I’ve spent with it, the gameplay is mostly solid and the graphics are beautifully rendered. It feels like both Rogue Squadron AND X-Wing, which is a hell of an accomplishment. Bad news is several of the missions appear to be badly broken, requiring numerous restarts. The game is generous with checkpoints, so it’s not a huge deal, but it is annoying. Hopefully they patch that stuff. I also haven’t tried multiplayer yet. None of my friends have bit on picking this up, so I’m not sure when or if it will happen. Assuming I can power through the hammy story, I’ll at least finish the campaign sometime down the line, even if I can’t be bothered to care how any of this fits into the larger world of Star Wars.

Warzone- Still doing that Season 6 thing! Subways have been mostly a disappointment for me so far, and the new marksman rifle has made the current meta a veritable hell for anyone with underdeveloped quick scoping skills, but I still get a couple matches in every day.

ANIME

God of High School- To say God of High School moves fast is an understatement. True to form, it sprinted its way through the finale. It’s got some lovely sequences, and I can’t wait to get my hands on the OST, but beyond a couple of choice battles, it didn’t leave a strong impression on me. I’m glad I saw it, but I’m not thirsting for a new season.

Dragon Ball- I switched over to the English dub of this show. I don’t usually do that, but I was struggling to keep my attention. I think in a way it helped? The English dub actors are far more cartoonish and silly, which really plays to the absurd animation and story turns. I’m on S1E13, and the first summoning of the dragon just happened. I won’t spoil except to say...this show has a deeply specific sense of humor, and I’m starting to dig it?

Fire Force- Season 2 is finally taking off for me. I’m on ep 14, and the focus has shifted over to the mysterious Joker. The battles have been compelling, as have been the mysteries placed by his storyline. I was struggling with feeling invested in S2 thus far, but the past few ep’s have reminded me of why I found this show special in the first place- when it gets serious and stays focused, it’s one of the tightest active shonen stories.

Manga

I’ve been on a bit of a manga break lately. Today I did take time with another chapter of Fruits Basket, which continues to be a lovely delight. I also recently received Master Edition copies of both Fairy Tail and Berserk. This week, my goal is to finish both Fruits Basket and my latest volumes of One Piece so I can dive into my new Master Editions.

Music

I haven’t had much change in my music tastes lately. I’ve been listening to a lot of Kompany and other dubstep artists, mostly ‘cuz I find the deep bass and variety of sounds soothing to me while I’m writing and zoning out during sessions of Cities: Skylines. I also enjoy its tempo while I’m running. Anything that helps the time pass, really.

Tabletop Games

I played 6 hours of DND this weekend. It was mostly a free-form improv session where I let the players do basically anything they wanted to within the gameworld we established during The Lost Mines of Phandelver. It was very heavy on roleplay, without a single instance of combat. While I was personally exhausted after the session, the players expressed that they had a very good time. We’ll be looking to finish up what they started in a bonus session for October!

Wrastlin!

My WWF Discord group just finished 1999 King of the Ring. Mr. Ass won! One of our folks actually got her bracket right. I had predicted Kane winning, so I was obviously out of luck on that. In the last RAW, Stone Cold Steve Austin just won the Heavy Weight Title from the Undertaker in an unlikely win! We’ll see how long that stint lasts...

Streams

I tried streaming from my personal Twitch using a schedule last week!

It...had mixed results.

My Warzone streams were my most popular, which is funny, ‘cuz I’m not that good at Warzone. My least popular were my Dungeon of the Endless and Yakuza 0 streams, which is not a big surprise. Those games aren’t that fun to watch.

I wanted to do the schedule as a an attempt to see if I could get a small audience or find some new meaning in games I was working through by presenting them as content.

I found the answer to both was more or less “not really”.

And that’s okay!

I also learned streaming, even just for an hour a night, is hard work. We should all be kinder to our content creators and in awe of the friends we have who do it even when on one is watching. Content creation is so unforgiving. Maybe if I stuck with it longer I’d have found my niche, but honestly, I just enjoy games for the games, and turning them into content just isn’t my speed. 

I’ve been doing the whole SpriteClub thing per usual. I’m a paid subscriber now! And I even am on a greeting basis with some folks. That’s been really cool. We had debuts this weekend too, where creators submit new fighters. The system matches them with other fighters to determine ratings. It’s a lot of fun, and the event always has this festival atmosphere to it. 

I’ve also been watching a lot of streams from the gals over at hololive-EN. Specifically, I’ve been watching Gawr Gura, Amelia Watson and Mori Calliope. It’s become nightly viewing in my household. I’ll save the debate on V-Tubers for a different place, suffice to say I have enjoyed the games they’ve presented and the personalities they’ve developed, and I think the success they’ve found is well earned. There are some talented folks behind these projects, and I find the streams to be relaxing, enjoyable, and at hours I can actually tune in for.

Personal News

Lately, I’ve been feeling pretty down. This can be easily correlated with the shift in temperature, for sure. I know a lot of people really dig fall, and I used to be a SPOOKY SEASON guy myself, but as I get older, fall has shifted into this period of mourning as I recognize the shortening days and the coming winter, which has always played hell with my body.

I’ve been struggling with a number of phantom symptoms that seem to pop up this time of year- bad digestion, terrible sleep (likely resulting from mild apnea), fatigue and heart palpitations. In turn, my mental health has been seriously flagging. 

At the suggestion of my therapist, I’ve started up a new vitamin regimen including a multivitamin and magnesium. I’ve also focused on finding potassium enriched foods and have cut back significantly on my drinking and caffeine. So far, this has actually resulted in me gaining weight ‘cuz I’ve been indulging in a lot of sugar as a coping mechanism, but I’m working through getting back to a healthy place where I can both track my intake but also be content with where I’m at. Right now I’m doing my best to try and fight the urge to become a Nap Guy. 

Last week I took several naps, even on my off days, and I’ve had a hard time sustaining my energy throughout the day, so I’m doing a better job of getting the sleep my body asks for while also structuring my day with more purpose so I’m left with less time just lying around wondering what to do.

Last week I broke my personal best for a 5K, breaking 24 minutes. For today’s run, I plan to try and break my 7:30 time on my mile run to the gym. 

For weights, I’ve gotten into a rhythm of 3 times a week, with Mondays and Fridays focusing on my core exercises- presses and curls, with Wednesdays focusing on pulls that are centered on working out my back, as well as bodyweight exercises such as dips and pull ups. This variation has given my limbs more time to heal up, which is welcome. Now if only I could be kinder to my body AFTER the gym, I might see some actual progress!

Work continues to be what it is. I’m at 30 hours now, which continues to be a huge positive. I don’t think I could keep at it with 40 hours. Change is a constant, and they seem to find new ways to make our jobs more convoluted every day. I have a quarterly review coming up with my new supervisor, but I have a feeling it won’t be nearly so traumatic as the last one, as I’ve done a good job of straightening up and flying right.

As I get more distance from August, I’m starting to recognize it- the events of my workplace disasters, my unplanned vacation, my off the rails spending and drinking- for what it was- it was a breakdown. And I’m still recovering from it. I was deeply unwell, and I took on some trauma- some of it wasn’t stuff I was looking for, some of it was stuff I brought on myself. I’m working through it. I wish I could say things like therapy have made a huge difference, but frankly, most of the work comes from stuff like this, where I’m just writing and being transparent with myself. That’s where I find the most healing work happens.

I still have a lot of my social media muted. When I need news, it typically filters through into my Discord, or Yahoo dings my phone or I see it on my Facebook feed. It’s fair to say that lately it’s felt like everything just Happens So Much.

I feel for my friends who are directly impacted- by the election, by the supreme court, by...just, everything. It all makes my own personal journey and endeavors feel...deeply small. At the same time, I just don’t have the emotional capacity required to house this perpetual crowd of events or constantly process everything in real time. I’m not sure when, if ever, I will have that again. I struggle to read ANYTHING- even friendly sites like Defector or The Discourse, without feeling an immense downswing.

I don’t know what the answer is. I wish I could just gut up and stay constantly plugged in for the sake of pals who might need to openly hash this out or draw attention to their causes or needs, but based on the past few months, I’m not sure I can take care of myself, let alone others. As I often tell close friends, my priorities these days are this small and in this order- Stay Healthy, Stay Kind, Stay Employed, Stay Productive- anything that goes right beyond that feels like a bonus in 2020.

At any rate, thanks for reading the update, y’all!

I’ll try and post these more regularly. I just wanted to check in with everyone and let y’all know how everything is going these days. Stuff like this helps me keep honest, as lately I’ve had a hard time sussing out what my direction is these days. Stay safe and well, and hit me up with what you’re up to, when you find a moment!

[buckv-barnes]

Ace Comic Con Panel - Sebastian’s Q&A

full video - part one | two | three

note: i’ve put brackets around some of the fan questions that you might have heard about or you don’t want to read :)

Kevin Smith: -Give it up for Bucky Barnes himself - Sebastian Stan.

Sebastian Stan: What an intro, thank you so much. Thank you.

KS: Don’t be weird, sit right here man.

SS: This couch-

KS: Come on closer, it’s not like we’re in a movie theater like, you sit over there. How are you sir?

SS: No, i’m good. I’m just seeing this couch is big for three. But of, course there’s only one. You know, I’m the only one here, of course, because Tom Holland is two hours behind. “Two hours behind.” And he’s not gonna be here with me. So, I wonder why that is?

KS: He doesn’t like sharing the stage with you?

SS: No, no he doesn't. I actually heard a rumour from Joe that said, you know, he was like Holland doesn't want to have any scenes with you and Mackie. And I was like c'mon that's a joke. Like you know, the whole things a joke. There might be some truth to it, but I don't know.

KS: It was after that first experience in Civil War like, 'I’m done with these guys?'

SS: Yeah, maybe. That might have been it, or just any other times we walked into each other sort of, you know like, on the lot, or on the set or whatever. He doesn't, you know, he just seems to be very after his own needs.

KS: He's not looking after Bucky's needs is what you’re saying?

SS: No, he's looking at the Downey camp like, 'When am I going to have that camp?' That's kind of what he's like. Anyway.

KS: We're gonna tell him when he comes out here and see if he cries.

SS: Please do.

KS: What, er, take us back to the beginning, when you first find out you're going to be in 'Captain America: The First Avenger'. Did they tell you, this character, could keep going? Was there plans at that point?

SS: Yeah, I mean they, you know, they did talk about that, and-, but it was a very strange kinda conversation, because there was nothing definitive about it, just sort of like- 'Look we'd like to see this go that way one day, if we're lucky enough and the movies doing(?) well.' And I was like, 'Great, that sounds great. Let’s do it.' But, yeah, I didn't necessary think that was going to happen. I just, it was good they told me because I, tried to think about the future when we were shooting that first movie and just hopefully, lay in stuff that may, be able to track later in the movies and the character.

KS: So, when you were shooting, ‘The First Avenger’, and ‘Bucky, dies’, for all intensive(?) purposes, there is no guarantee you can come back, you’ll be like, ‘this may be my death scene’.

SS: Well, you know I had a little guarantee, I’ve said this before. The first time I fell off the train, I did only have the one arm. I had a green sleeve, meaning that they were going to do something with it. And I was like this is good, that means we could probably, maybe, that’s where it’s gonna go. And then we ended up re-shooting that scene without the green sleeve, and I was like, ‘Oh’. Maybe, I am dead. Which is kind of- am now?

KS: Apparently, I’m not Bucky as much as I Sucky(?) and they cut me out of the movie. So when do you find out though, like hey man, next movie your character’s right in the title with the main character?

SS: Well, I pretty sure, the way I found out about that title was, a friend of mine called me from Comic Con and said, ‘Dude, you’re in the movie.’ And I was like, ‘Oh, really?’ and they were like, ‘Yeah! Because the title is your characters’ in the title.’ (note: that is how he said it!) And that’s how I found out.

KS: What was it like as an actor, I’m sure you were never ‘Man, I wanna be in blockbusters’, but eventually it happened. What was it like, when somebody’s like you’re going from playing a very sporting character in the first movie to, it’s going to be your movie, your co-sharing that movie, the second time around?

SS: It’s probably a lot of pressure when but not, you feel a little scared, I certainly was. I don’t- You rise up to the challenge, I mean, it’s good to be scared. Right? It’s good thing and there was a real opportunity there for me and, in a sense of like taking the character in that direction. I welcomed it. But again, I never- I’m used to it now, I never know where they’re going to take that situation. I didn’t even know what happened in the last movie (Infinity War) until we were shooting it.

KS: I spoke to Elizabeth (Olsen) and Paul Bettany this morning, and we were talking about the ending in Infinity War, and they were like, the Russo’s pulled them into a van and just before they shot the scene they were like, this is the ending of the movie. That’s how they found out about it. Did you get the van treatment as well?

SS: I know the van they’re talking about. I said, I’m not going in that van.

KS: You were raised right, you had smart parents.

SS: I was like, I wanna be around people when they tell me this. But yeah, this is when you disappear. I was like, ‘what does this mean? Really?’ or, I don’t know, it was right on the day. It’s kind of amazing, the Russo’s, if you think about it you have- If you think about it my character makes sense to be in the dark, in a way, he sort of is in the dark. Just the way they were able to put that movie together is fascinating. It was kind of exciting for all of us because when we were sitting there at the premiere, we were seeing it for the first time.

KS: Something as spiralling as that, I imagine, it’s hard to keep track of a movie, you’re almost in every scene, something like Infinity War you’re like ‘Wait, we’re in Wakanda. What’s going on in space? Don’t worry about it.’

SS: Yeah, which is what the character sort of got as a message anyway. It was sort of like, you’re needed again, so if you wanna gain anybody’s trust, you better go with the flow.

KS: The movies like this in terms of other performances an actor gets to do, a lot of it is physical, there’s a lot of action and what not. How long in advance, I’ve always wondered, everyone in these movies is in impeccably in shape. Sooner or later they’ll be like, ‘Take you shirt off!’ and we’ll see dudes with their shirts of which I know makes me feel bad. (Crowd screaming) He’s not going to take his shirt of.

SS: They’re not asking Anthony Mackie to take his shirt off. He’s up on those wires anyway.

KS: How long before the movie begins do you have to start getting in shape? Getting physical? Or is that normal a part of your regime anyway? Or do you have to double it up in a marvel movie?

SS: No, I mean it becomes an all-around routine because when you’re not working that’s kind of what you’re doing for your sanity. Depends, you start out with a goal and then when you start shooting, there’s no way you make it to the gym at like 4 in the morning. You still try but you shoot all day, your sweating a lot and losing a lot of weight. So, by the end of the movie everybody is at least 10 pounds less when they started.

KS: Is that right? Making one of these Marvel movies is the good way to lose weight?

SS: It kind of is. Here’s the thing, if your shooting in Atlanta, it’s really hot down there and then you’re strapped in these really tight outfits and your moving constantly, running around. Your body is like a furnace burning, burning, burning.  We all go through some stress your making a movie.

KS: Bro, look at me. I never lose weight.  On movies it’s the opposite, I gain 10-15 pounds like, this looks good. It’s free? I’ll take it.

SS: I’ve definitely done the- Because you’re waiting around too, so that’s the other thing. You’re always waiting around. I’ve definitely done that part, I know what you’re saying. Fortunately with these, it’s the moving around, and you start having a lot of- your ego is pretty high and you’re like, I’m gonna do the stunts, I’m going to do as much as I can. But then when you’re doing it on the eighteenth take, your body is kind of wrecked by that point.

KS: So you, ‘Bring in that stunt person, please.’

SS: They might bring them in a lot earlier than that but they’re also the best of guys. I mean those guys really make those action sequences, Sam Hargrave and James Young were just, all the way back to the ‘Winter Soldier’. In a way they reinvented the Captain America fighting style.

KS: That second one is badass, it sorts of, it’s the boat at the beginning and just takes everybody out (?). There has been 3 Captain America movies, and you’ve been in each one of them. You got to have a favourite, which one? Is it ‘The Winter Soldier’?

SS: Yeah, I really liked that one, that one has-

KS: It’s got a lot of Sebastian in it, so yeah

SS: The Winter Solider? No! I mean the Civil War does. The Winter Soldier was cryptic and was like strange. The whole process for that was a fun for me, I’m saying this and they’ll be like ‘perfect! Lets never write a line for him again.’ I didn’t have a lot of lines for that movie. It was all kind of like, trying to tell a story physically and it was interesting in a way, I guess.

KS: I haven’t thought about it, you have way more dialogue in Civil War than you do in The Winter Soldier.

SS: Yeah.

KS: The Winter Soldier was like ‘Who the hell is Bucky?’

SS: That’s it! And then you’re haunted by that line. I was haunted for a long time. I really think I was going in circles forever, like ‘who the hell, who the hell is Bucky, who the-‘ It’s just saying-

KS: You got one line in the movie and you gotta get it right man.

SS: It’s like the Aviator, where you’re like ‘show me the blueprints.’ ‘show me-‘ ‘who the hell is Bucky.’

KS: Excellent pull on the Aviator, man. Alright take us into the world of making marvel movies. Who are you friendly with? Who do you spend a lot of time with on set? Who’s your buddy?

SS: I mean, I think, Anthony and Chris obviously were the guys im closest to and I’ve spent the most time with and I genuinely feel like, we could not talk for a year and we’d pick it right up like nothing happened. Paul Bettany’s become a friend and I just love interacting with him, anything that I- I’ve got two scenes with him barely in the last movie and I just loved every minute of it. Chadwick’s actually really funny as well, he has a sense of humour that many don’t see right away. It’s a good group of people. I don’t know. Paul Rudd is a- Can’t keep a straight face around him. A lot of great people.

KS: It’s awesome to hear, you just call him Chadwick. The rest of us calls him Chadwick Boseman and you just call him Chadwick, and you can just leave it right there, because ‘I actually know the Black Panther.’

SS: Well, in Civil War, he was kinda doing his own thing- may have done it in Black Panther- he was doing a bit of a method acting situation. He was not interacting much with people, he was off on his own.

KS: Oh really, so he was like the character, I got to stay disconnected-

SS: I was like, we weren’t really talking very much and I remember on that rooftop scene in Civil War they we kind of going head to head. He and I didn’t exchange a lot of words, all I remember is that mask coming at me and these long arms coming at me, sweeping at me. So maybe it was effective, I don’t know. He’s just really, really talented.

KS: Take us into the airport sequence in Civil War which is the greatest comic book sequences ever put into film. There’s like 928 superheroes in this scene, so it was like a real clusterf-ck. What was it like to shoot it? Did it take place over the course of a couple of weeks?

SS: Months. It was months. We was always coming back to it. There was always another sequence in that bit that we hadn’t shot yet or needed to come back to. It’s surreal when you did have a bit of down time, I mean everybody was there interacting and kind of- you didn’t always have everybody there- but the few days you did, there was a couple of shots where we had everybody like the line-ups, and that was pretty special. I didn’t want be- I was always concerned like I was going to be the slowest runner and I was like, I can’t be the last guy getting across.

KS: Making a marvel movie is like a high school gym.

SS: Yes! It is, it is.

KS: I’m not letting Evans bet me!

SS: No. It gets a little bit like that… You didn’t have Hemsworth so that was a plus. He gets on set and you’re like I don’t even know why I go to the gym. Why would I even do that. I guess that it’s mental strength!

KS: I’m not even ‘Hemworthy’ enough to be here!

SS: Yes! Definitely not! He’s insane. It’s amazing.

KS: During the course of making these movies a lot of physicality, do you ever get hurt? Ever get injured?

SS: Yeah, for sure. You’re always getting something, some hit. You never know until later because the adrenaline is really high and you’re in the middle of it and want to keep doing it and its usually the next day, your trying to get out of bed and you can’t. You feel it. Yeah.

KS: At that point you’re like f-ck Marvel? Or do you work through it like money is good.

SS: You’re like, ‘I like my job.’ No! You’re always grateful, of course! The thing is you remember what it was like when you were little, like the cowboy and Indians thing. It’s sort of that thing that never leaves you in a way, you go to work and you go ‘wow’ this is my job.  You wanna try and sell that fight as best as you can and you can’t really sell it once in a while without landing a- something.

KS: You watch something- having worked in production, I know they edit it and stuff and I know they throw fake punches. Sometimes these cats go together so hard you had to have connected.  

SS: Oh! I’m sure, it’s happened a million times!

KS: What is your best memory of making a Marvel movie so far? Happiest moment, best day so far? Or in post, cause selling the movies seem like you have a lot of fun and going out on the press circuit and stuff.

SS: I’ve never been on a press- world press tour, for anything before, that was pretty special. Just going to different places and going to Asia for the first time is still a big memory for me cause I’ve never been and you see how everybody is so excited about the movies over there and then the same in Europe. You never get over that, you never get tired of that. I think that at the end of the day going home at night and feeling like you know your part of a good goal and everybody is on the same page. You wanna make the best possible product- the thing you can. And people are looking out for you that way, it doesn’t feel like- you can be in an environment where you feel like people are competitive, where it’s weird and something. Other than trying to run fast you don’t really feel- everyone’s on the same team with this one.

KS: Alright, I’m going to open up to these cats. We’ve got two microphones right there, and people are jumping up to them right now. We’re going to start on this side…

(Fan gets attacked by the mic, Kevin replies with don’t let it break your nose. Just a fyi.)

Fan 1: First of all, I love you.

SS: I love you too.

Fan 2: What’s the worst part of being an actor? What’s the worst things that happen.

SS: Oh god, probably, falling in love with a project and then not seeing it happen and having it fall apart right before you’re shooting. That’s happened to me a few times. Or hearing the word ‘No’ over and over again, that happens a lot too.

KS: A lot of rejection in this business.

SS: Yeah, you do, you have it but there’s a way to use that to come back to it. Stronger or something.

Fan 1: Ok, cool. Another question, what’s it like working with Robert Downey Jr.?

SS: The guy is a legend. I don’t know, I grew up on Chaplin and all those movies, you never know with him, you’re gonna end up with a real reaction, you never know what’s coming at you. He’s so quick and witted, in the moment it always amazes you.

KS: How close does he stay to the page? I’ve always wondered. He sounds like he (makes it up?) dialogue. Am I wrong?

SS: He does and he doesn’t. He will do it a few times. That’s the thing, he says it so naturally, you go ‘was that even written?’ once he’s done it a few times, I feel he can’t help himself, he’s got to do something different each time. He keeps it new, that kind of thing.

(Sketch book fan!)

Fan 3: I was wondering if you wanted to look at my sketch book?

SS: I would gladly look at your sketch book. Come find me after? (looking at Kevin) Is that what you say?

KS: Can we pass it up here? While we answer the next question? We can use everybody just passing forward. If you don’t get it back, Sebastian stole it.

SS: Yeah, it would be me.

Fan 3: That’s fine as well.

KS: Send it up! We’ll get it into his hands. Meanwhile, we’ll jump over here and jump back to you for a review of your portfolio.

Fan 4: If Bucky got hold of the infinity gauntlet, what do you think he would do with it?

(Background fan: Deep important question!)

KS: It’s a great question.

SS: It is a great question. There’s only one place he would go and that’s back in time! (sebastian’s now received the book) Yeah, he’d probably go back in time. Try to fix all the things he’s done wrong, for starters. Maybe… Not get on that train? I don’t know.

SS: (towards sketch book fan) This is really great, by the way! (looking through) Oh my god, hello!

KS: Flip it this way.. This is legit, man! I know you didn’t ask me, but excellent job!

SS: A lot of complex things going on there. Oh my god, you’re very talented. Nice recurring theme.

(Kevin notices Loki as a snake)

SS: Each one of these pictures is like my worst nightmare. Pretty much.

KS: Want him to tag the book for you, while he’s got it?

Fan 3: Sure. Why not.

KS: (Sebastian signs the book) He wrote, ‘I drew this.’

SS: This is really great. Keep drawing! Don’t stop!

(Here’s one of my warnings! Slightly awkward)

Fan 5: Before I ask my question, my brother is a huge fan of the Captain America franchise. He has a group that he cosplays with, a group of friends. He plays Captain American and his friend, N, is Bucky, obviously. I was wondering if you could give a quick, hello to my brother and his friend?

SS: Hello-

Fan 5: Wait, not ready!

SS: This is amazing. Hello N, and the brother!

Fan 5: My question is: I fell in love with you first when I saw you as Jefferson at the time. By the way, I love you.

SS: I love you too.

Fan 5: You play a lot of characters that, deal with a lot of heavy-

SS: Issues?

Fan 5: No! They really deal with hard emotions. It’s sometimes difficult as an actor to reach that place and it’s hard to come back from that. So I’m wondering, actor to actor, how do you not let the negative emotions that you portray in characters affect you and how do you translate over to- you! How do you keep them separate? Cause you’re always this happy puppy.

SS: Wow, that’s…

KS: Well happy puppy, what do you say?

SS: Yeah, exactly. I don’t know if I’m a happy puppy all the time. No-one really is right? I think you have to try and not isolate yourself. It’s who you keep around in your life, that’s why it’s so important, your family and friends, who you trust. You can’t lose that sense of ground that is you, yourself. If I’m away somewhere on set, I try to check in with people and it’s ok to check in! I think people are so scared sometimes to admit that ‘I’m not having a great day!’ like, ‘what’s up, what’s going on?’ I think it’s okay to say that, and one of your friends is going to call you back.  Please tell people when you’re not having a good day! That’s what I do I guess.

KS: I’m going to ask you a quick question. When you play Bucky, you’re playing a character that carries expectation with him. People be like, ‘I’ve been reading this character in the books since I was a kid.’ So, there’s a certain amount of pressure there and there’s freedom because nobody knows what Bucky sounds like, until they put him on film for the first time and it’s you, so you get to set the tone. But recently, you were on I, Tonya, right?  And so, in that case you had to play a person the world knew, somebody who was well documented on film and stuff. What was the difficultly in that and the marvel stuff?

SS: That has its own weird expectations, in its own way. Expectations is the biggest enemy no matter how you cut it. I think you have no choice to- it’s more mechanical, I just watched what I could on the guy (Jeff), over and over, I just listened to any audio I had of him over and over again. Until I could feel like it was becoming me. It’s tough because you have to adjust to something that already exists. But sometimes that’s good too! You know where you’re going. Bucky had source and material. But in the movies, like you said at the beginning, in the comic books, he was a kid.

KS: Yeah, there was nothing you could go off of.

SS: They came in and we like, okay we’re going to have him more of a bigger brother and have this guy whether or not enlist. It’s sort of it’s own pros and cons.

(LGBT fan)

SS: Hi, what’s up?

Fan 6: Nothing much.

SS: How’s the German Shepard? (Dog the fan has.)

Fan 6: The German Shepard is great. His name is R. As a gay man, I really appreciate it when you play gay characters. Do you feel like you’ll ever go back into playing and LGBT character?

SS: Yeah, why not? I would in a second. It’s always about the script, the story telling, what kind of obstacles a character has in their life and what they’re trying to get through and that doesn’t matter. We’re all fighting against something and we’re all facing something. We all want to change and get better at, that’s universal. It’s just about having the right story. If it happens, why not?

 (End of part one. Part two with Sebastian and Anthony Mackie)

note: sorry for typos and grammar mistakes. I tried getting this out quickly!

#sebastian stan #kevin smith #ace comic con #anthony mackie #tom holland #long post

[aion-rsa]

Mortal Kombat Sequel: What Should Happen Next

https://ift.tt/3sT79DK

IT HAS BEGUN!

Or it will. Mortal Kombat came out and did all right for itself. The reboot has its highs and its lows, but one thing I will say it does a better job at is setting up a sequel. The 1995 original had a decent enough cliffhanger with a kaiju-sized Shao Kahn popping in and everyone ready to just kick his ass, but at the time, there weren’t too many promising places to take the sequel.

The first movie was just so front-loaded that the second didn’t have enough to rope us in. That’s why it’s probably for the best that Johnny Cage is currently being treated purely as a sequel hook. He’s the carrot on the stick meant to keep us interested in keeping this franchise going.

Also there’s still a tournament. As someone who has seen every adaptation of Mortal Kombat (outside of the Live Tour, but once I get this time machine finished…), I can understand why they would want to try something new with the narrative. Treating everything as a big prelude to the sequel, which will actually do the tournament, is a fine enough option. Just as long as they deliver. Oh, and try to make the tournament make sense! Both the original and the Scorpion’s Revenge animated film just make up the rules as they go along. I want some goddamn brackets!

So here are some other things we’d like to see in the Mortal Kombat sequel.

A Johnny Cage Who Can Fight

Obviously. Johnny Cage is Warner Brothers’ chance to get a big name actor in there. Since he was so good in the animated movie, I thought about Joel McHale getting jacked up for the role, but he’d be in his 50s by then. I know WWE’s Miz is also campaigning for the role, but while that would be adorable, I simply want a Johnny Cage who not only has charisma, but can do some kind of martial arts.

Linden Ashby was able to pull it off, but the less our new Hollywood egomaniac has to be carried by editing and his opponents, the better. Really, just go with Scott Adkins.

Noob Saibot and Sub-Zero II

I know Cole Young isn’t everyone’s cup of tea, but the sequel can completely redeem his existence by using the second Sub-Zero as his rival and counterpart. In the games, the Sub-Zero/Scorpion stuff happened in the present day, so Kuai Liang was Bi-Han’s brother and took up the Sub-Zero mantle in-between the first two entries. He ended up being a more honorable warrior and became one of the series’ main heroes.

Considering the new movie’s version of Bi-Han is—for an unexplained reason—borderline immortal, his successor wouldn’t be his brother but likely his descendant. Weirdly, it would be a descendant that he would have coexisted with, but sure. Therefore you get a new Sub-Zero who is to the original what Cole Young is to Scorpion.

Read more

Movies

Mortal Kombat (2021) vs. Mortal Kombat (1995): Which is Better?

By David Crow

Games

Mortal Kombat: 15 Most Powerful Characters

By Gavin Jasper

Shang Tsung hinted at bringing back some of his dead henchmen, so Bi-Han will likely return as the insidious Noob Saibot. On paper, that’s a tag team match of bloodline vs. bloodline. Except there’s some good drama in there if you have the new Sub-Zero stray from what the original wants him to do.

Kitana and Edenia

Probably one of the stranger choices in Mortal Kombat was to include Mileena as one of the flunkies and kill her off when there hasn’t been a single mention of Kitana. Having Mileena mean nothing is a mistake that both movie continuities have made.

We’re probably another movie away before Shao Kahn becomes a major player in this franchise. He might have as much a role in the sequel as Thanos does in the first Guardians of the Galaxy. Kitana can show up though, both as his assassin and/or his betrayer, giving us a better idea of what he’s all about without actually having him appear.

Also, with Kung Lao gone, Liu Kang is in desperate need of connecting to someone. Giving him a Juliet to his Romeo would be welcome.

Recognizable Backgrounds

The Mortal Kombat series is known for so many cool and unique places for the characters to fight. So it was a little disappointing that the new movie featured such locations as a sand pit, the insides of a crappy house, and a frozen-over locker room. Even the use of the Pit meant nothing as nobody got knocked into the spikes.

Give us the Dead Pool or the Living Forest. Or that one stage with the portals in the background while the shadow priests float around. Anything from Mortal Kombat II. Get some of that rad Outworld real estate.

We’re Going to Need a New Heavy

Throwing Goro in for the sake of having Goro was a ballsy move for the movie, and probably a foolish one. Goro is more than just a brick house of an enemy to go through. He’s the heart and soul of the first Mortal Kombat game and its tournament. He stopped mattering after the fact, but in the storyline of the first game and first movie adaptation, he was the gigantic threat. He was the irresistible force that everyone was too afraid to talk about because he might hear you.

The 2021 movie proceeded to use Goro for the sake of scaring Cole into growing his mutant power shirt before Cole brutally murdered him. Sure, he can come back in the sequel, but what’s the point? He’s lost all of his mystique. He’s no longer the scary giant.

There are options for replacements. They could use Kintaro, although he’d be more of the same. Perhaps Motaro? Eh, centaurs are too cumbersome to work. They might have to bring in someone like Moloch or even Blaze in just to give us the necessary moment of, “Whoa, what the HELL is that?!”

Bring Back Kano

Just… bring him back. If Sub-Zero #1 is obviously returning as Noob Saibot, then there’s no reason why Shang Tsung or the Black Dragon, or Quan Chi, or Shinnok can’t just resurrect Kano and put a metal plate where his wound was. The biggest mistake of Mortal Kombat: Annihilation was cheating us out of the best performances from the first movie. So please, Warner Bros., give us some more Josh Lawson.

A resurrected Kano would not only bring back the fantastic comic relief, but he’d be the ultimate wild card. Maybe he can find redemption? Maybe he’ll still be a total bastard and work for the villains. Maybe they could play up fellow Black Dragon member Jarek’s in-game storyline where he’s so freaked out by the threat of Shinnok (or whoever) that he knows that there is no monetary gain he can get out of the situation, and no reason to do anything but save his skin by helping save the world.

Or maybe Shang Tsung morphs into Kano and gets hit on the head so hard that he forgets how to turn back to normal and is stuck spending the rest of the movie as a wise-cracking Australian. I’m spit-balling here.

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The post Mortal Kombat Sequel: What Should Happen Next appeared first on Den of Geek.

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#aion-rsa #Den of Geek

[filmsarepretentious]

Mortal Kombat (1995)

Somehow, I had avoided watching this classic piece of cinema history for all 20 years of my life, and honestly, I’m kind of glad I did, because I just got to experience it, “fresh” and “new” (*cough*1995*cough*), for the first time. And wow, what a movie. I’ll admit, I was never the biggest fan of the games, because I never happened to own any of them as a kid, and it felt a little late to get into as an adult, but I think perhaps knowing next to nothing about the franchise may have actually made the movie more palatable to me, as I went into it with absolutely no expectations, and so no hopes or dreams were dashed. But anyway, let’s talk about the movie itself. ~spoilers ahead~

So, it opens, and you see this Asian teenager getting the snot kicked out of him by a more evil, older Asian guy. They’re both speaking English, so I guess it must be a pretty common language in China, because I’m sure this movie is 100% accurate in every way. Anyway, the kid gets his soul sucked out of him, the evil guy shouts something menacing, and then -bam- a different English-speaking Asian guy wakes up. It was all a dream! The cop-out of the century! …or was it? (For real, I’m asking, was it a dream? Was it a psychic thing? I honestly have no idea).

Anyway, we learn the name of our new friend: he’s Liu Kang, and I guess he’s the main character or something.

Somewhere along the way, we also meet our other two leads, a no-nonsense blonde lady who is possibly a cop (?) named Sonya Blade, and Chris Evans. Wait, no, Johnny Bravo. Okay, wait wait wait, his name is Johnny Cage, and he’s basically the bad guy from Karate Kid. 

So, various reasons, our heroes make their way onboard a Viking-esque ship which takes them to the island from LOST, where they’re going to fight to save earth from…aliens?

Okay, I need to be perfectly frank. I was very sleepy while watching this movie, and I only absorbed about 15% of the actual plot, so if I describe things incorrectly, I’m sorry (but not really).

So, the aliens! Apparently, once every century or so, the aliens hold a tournament, and if they win 10 tournaments in a row, then they get to take over earth. (It’s nice that the aliens follow the rules like that–they honestly seem like some pretty stand up guys!) Now, it just so happens that the aliens have won the last 9 tournaments, so this is a pretty clutch year for the earthlings, and judging by the fact that most of the aliens have been training for this tournament their entire lives, while the earthlings all just found out about it like two days ago, you’d think the odds were stacked pretty well for a 10th alien victory. However, you have to keep in mind that there was a previous scene where Liu Kang talks to some monks and a white man in very culturally-appropriated clothes, and they call Liu “the chosen one.” Whenever there’s a chosen one, you know things are gonna work out well for him. I mean, except Anakin Skywalker, but he barely counts.

The questionably racially inappropriate character is also on the island, and his name is Raiden, the god of thunder (or something along those lines). Throughout the movie, Raiden’s voice changes about five times, and it really started to weird me out about half way through. I way originally struck with how dumb his voice sounded when we’re first introduced to him, because it was super obvious the actor was trying to sound gravelly and old, despite being no older than 40. Later in the movie, the actor switches around several times, going deeper, higher, and one time more nasally. I like to think that the actor was actually just playing around, and the director either didn’t notice or didn’t care.

Okay, back on topic! The tournament begins, and people start killing eachother via a nice bracket system. We meet one more good guy named Kitana, and she’s 10000 years old and smitten with 20-something Liu Kang, but they’re both consenting adults, so I guess it’s fine.

All the other classic characters are also around, like Scorpion, Kano, Sub-Zero, etc, but they’re not main characters, so I’m just going to pretend they don’t exist. Wait, except! Scorpion’s fight with Johnny Cage was pretty cool, because they had an alternate dimension set that they fought in, and it looked almost like something out of Silent Hill. Good job on set design, Brian Jewell and Galia Nitzen!

Okay, so finally, there’s a big face off between Liu Kang and the evil guy from the beginning of the movie, and for the third dang time, the epic Mortal Kombat theme music starts playing. Liu has to overcome something and face his fears blah blah blah. There’s a moment where evil guy transforms into Liu’s brother, and I’m sure if I had been less sleepy, I probably would have gotten a little choked up, not because it was well done, but because I’m way too emotional and will cry at literally anything.

So yeah, Liu kills evil guy, the world is saved, not-so-sagely thunder god cracks a joke, and everything is hunky dory.

WHEN SUDDENLY the leader of the aliens is like, “Oooohh I will kill you now, even though if I could have done that to begin with, why would I have gone through all the trouble of sending a bunch of my underlings to fight in a cute little competition?” And, cliffhanger!

So yeah, what a movie. Honestly, I’ve given it too hard a time, because it really was a fun 101 minutes. The writing wasn’t horrible, the acting wasn’t horrendous, and the set design was actually pretty dang good. The CGI made me want to barf, but it was the 90s; good CGI was as rare as *insert funny and relatable joke about the 90s here*. All in all, I’d give it a solid 3 pairs of $500 sunglasses out of 5! 

#film review #movie reviews #mortal kombat

[placetobenation]

Welcome back to the roaring 20’s my friends! It’s time to have 20/20 vision as we enter the year 2020 for the WWE. And with it, it begins the road to the Royal Rumble and more importantly, the road to WrestleMania in Tampa this April!

.@YaOnlyLivvOnce is HERE…and she's in love with @LanaWWE?! #RAW #LanaLashleyWedding pic.twitter.com/RDDPnNV0Ep

— WWE (@WWE) December 31, 2019

Star of the week – Lana and Liv.

How could it not be, right! Lana absolutely stole the show this Monday night as the overbearing bride-to-be in the near nuptials with Bobby Lashley. We now know of course that Liv Morgan spoiled the party by coming out as Lana’s lover while Ruse crashed and crushed Lashley after hiding out in the oversized wedding cake in the ring. While some on social media panned it, I absolutely found it entertaining as hell! What once was a storyline we all wanted to just go away, now has legs and a new twist with I’m sure a mixed tag-team match to come.

Plus, it looks like we’ll be seeing more of AJ Styles and Randy Orton as Orton faked a knee injury to RKO Styles with a rope-a-dope promo bringing back memories of Mark Henry’s faux retirement to squash John Cena.

How about the newcomers? John Morrison, Sheamus and The Usos all found their way back to the WWE Friday night on the first Smackdown of the year. The most intriguing of the trio to me is Morrison as it appears The Miz is headed down the heel turn road. While the crowd may love the babyface Miz, a more serious, in it for me Miz is him at his best. The question will be can the WWE Universe hate him in the ring while loving him on Miz & Mrs.? A dilemma indeed!

RAW

RESULTS

Aleister Black defeated Buddy Murphy

Erick Rowan defeated Kip Stevans

Charlotte Flair defeated Natalya

The Street Profits defeated The O.C.

Drew McIntyre defeated Zack Ryder & Curt Hawkins

Non-title Match: US Champion Andrade defeated Ricochet

What we loved:

.@RusevBUL is HERE! The #LanaLashleyWedding just took a WILD turn on #RAW pic.twitter.com/I4Z2rUdVVq

— WWE (@WWE) December 31, 2019

Viva La Lana & Liv – Absolutely loved the wedding! Sure, it probably went a tad too long and messed up some folks DVR tapings, but as far as entertaining, it was an absolute grand slam!  From it all being about Lana to Rusev in the cake to Liv Morgan coming out as Lana’s lover, it hit all the buttons. And kudos to the Reverend, actor Scott Malone who said it was the craziest 20 minutes of his acting career. Welcome to a WWE wedding Mr. Malone. Now to those ECW fans out there, this one was surely a Paul Heyman storyline with shades of Beulah McGillicutty and Kimona in the ECW Arena.

The #LanaLashleyWedding on #Raw did NOT go as @LanaWWE had planned! But hey, at least there was cake!

pic.twitter.com/bdMB2K55HP

— WWE (@WWE) December 31, 2019

Black vs. Murphy – These two delivered once again. The only thing I ask is that somewhere down the road, they give these two an hour to do an IronMan Match! Physical and exciting as hell!

The Street Profits get some street cred – A much needed win against top competition for the The Street Profits. With the victory, they thrust themselves into the tag team title picture, facing The O.C. and The Viking Raiders in a triple-threat match this Monday night on RAW.

What we didn’t love:

TV 101 – Ok, to those who don’t know, I’ve produced a bit of tv in my day, so when things don’t make sense it drives me crazy! So, when you announce that Andrade will take on Rey Mysterio, Jr. in a rematch for the US Title next week before you show the footage of Andrade winning the title, it makes no sense. It’s the look things that make continuity folks! Make it seamless.

NXT

Adam Cole – NXT Male Competitor of the Year

Shayna Baszler – NXT Female Competitor of the Year

Johnny Gargano and Adam Cole – NXT Rivalry of the Year

Dakota Kai – NXT Future Star of the Year

TakeOver: WarGame – NXT TakeOver of the Year

Keith Lee – NXT Breakout Star of the Year

Johnny Gargano vs. Adam Cole 2-out-3-Falls at TakeOver: New York – NXT Match of the Year

Adam Cole – NXT Overall Competitor of the Year

The Street Profits defeated Oney Lorcan and Danny Burch, The Forgotten Sons, & Kyle O’Reilly and Bobby Fish to win NXT Tag Team Titles

TakeOver: WarGames – Team Ripley defeated Team Baszler 

TakeOver: New York – Johnny Gargano defeated Adam Cole to become NXT champion

A taped show for the first episode of NXT of the new decade. While it’s nice to showcase some of the best matches not shown on broadcast TV, I didn’t quite get the awards portion of the show. Why did we get Steven Regal handing out awards in an empty arena in the middle of the ring? It all seemed flat and with no purpose to showcase the best of NXT, especially after the momentum they built all year long. It just seemed like a throwaway. The ratings definitely proved it as a live edition of All Elite Wrestling nearly doubled NXT in ratings.

One good thing, we get the brackets for the 2020 Dusty Rhodes Tag Team Classic:

SMACKDOWN

RESULTS

Triple Threat Match: Lacey Evans & Dana Brooke defeated Sasha Banks & Bayley and Alexa Bliss & Nikki Cross

Chad Gable defeated Dash Wilder (Submission)

Kofi Kingston defeated The Miz

Otis defeated Drew Gulak

Braun Strowman defeated Cesaro

Roman Reigns & Daniel Bryan defeated King Corbin & Dolph Ziggler (by DQ when The Fiend interfered)

What we loved:

That ain't no make believe! @TheRealMorrison is BACK and he's on @WWE Friday Night #SmackDown.

pic.twitter.com/HmJgnNeByi

— WWE on FOX (@WWEonFOX) January 4, 2020

Welcome back – 2020 kicks off with a trio of returns. First, John Morrison is back to help out his old friend The Miz after his loss to Kofi Kingston. Then, Sheamus gets a huge pop to chase off The Revival only to lay out Shorty Gable. Finally, The Usos end the night to save their cousin Roman Reigns from another dog food beatdown from Dolph Ziggler and King Corbin. Good things ahead should be coming from all three (or four).

You're never the the same after facing 'The Fiend' @WWEBrayWyatt. As @mikethemiz has just proven. #SmackDown pic.twitter.com/Fs54tzuQsh

— WWE on FOX (@WWEonFOX) January 4, 2020

Mike The Miz-erable – It looks like we have a heel turn coming ladies and gentleman. Of course, we get The Miz is still bitter about The Fiend and missing out on a shot to get back at him at Royal Rumble now that Daniel Bryan beat him last week. But now, we get that frustration being taken out on The New Day and John Morrison is suddenly back to help his former tag team partner. Intriguing indeed could be The New Day vs. The Miz and Morrison. A slo-mo entrance is sure to follow!

The obligatory Otis – We have got to see Mama Otis, don’t we! I hope it doesn’t disappoint when Mamma meets Mandy Rose! Just a bit each week does us good!

What we didn’t get:

Where was The Miz – If The Miz is so hell bent on getting back at The Fiend, where was he during the main event when The Fiend attacked Daniel Bryan? Shouldn’t he have been racing out there to save the man he started the show wishing good luck to against The Fiend? It’s all in the details my friends.

The start – Why can’t we just start a WWE show with a match? The ladies tag team match was a very good one with the triple threat, but we had to endure the first segment of talk and a commercial break before getting to it. Sometimes less is more and the crowd, both at the arena and at home watching on tv, would get more into the show with action to start. Agree? Disagree? Let us know!

Parting shots:

Brock Lesnar – what will the Beast bring in 2020? We find out Monday night on RAW. Will we get an off-beat challenger for Royal Rumble – can you say Erick Rowan? Or does Seth Rollins and the Authors of Pain make him the next victim? Eiher way, you’ve got a bunch of unpredictability to Lesnar and the future of the Universal Champion.

Congratulations, @AndradeCienWWE & @MsCharlotteWWE!

https://t.co/SwfrrkQquK

— WWE (@WWE) January 1, 2020

Congratulations to Charlotte Flair and Andrade on their engagement! How soon will it be until we get the next great power couple in the WWE on TV?

#IFTTT #Place to Be Nation

[ghoultyrant]

Madoka: Rebellion

So I finally watched Madoka: Rebellion because some people insisted I would actually like it and have my concerns about its awfulness addressed if I watched it.

These people were badly mistaken.

Massive spoilers, of course.

As with my FoZ notes, [bracketed text] is notes I added in after the original writing, taking into account information from later in the movie.

---------------------

So wait, in Fixed-Verse, anyone can Witch out? (Yes I know they're called 'Nightmares' now. You know what I see? SUPER WITCHES) WHAT THE FUCK MADOKA. [We’re not actually seeing fixed-verse, so it’s not as dumb as I thought]

It took more than fifteen minutes for the plot to start going anywhere.

What is Kyoko doing in the same school in the same year as Madoka and Sayaka? She's more Mami's peer, so even if she was going to the same school she should be in a year above. THIS IS NOT HOW CAUSALITY FUCKERY WORKS. [”But Ghoul Tyrant!” I hear you say. “It’s supposed to be wrong like that because It’s All Just A Dream!” Sure. Fine. And Kyoko is still in their school in their year at the end of the movie because?...]

Oh: and of course we have 'fanservice'. Kill me. [It’s far, far more common than these notes might lead you to believe, as I was not going to note down every goddamn individual instance]

… why are the transformations in the Witch art style? (With a million panty shots fuck everything forever) I note we get a split-second Witch-word cut during Sayaka's one. Then Homura's did a Witch-word cut with, like, silent film surroundingness. Twice. [Taking into account later events, this is actually somewhat competent foreshadowing]

… they call themselves the 'holy quintet'? Really?

THE WITCH IS EL KABONG I INSTANTLY FORGIVE... some... of the horribleness.

Why are we doing the Cake Song. [Knowing what’s actually going on doesn’t make this any more sensical] Why are we 25 minutes in and I still have no clue what's going on?

It took thirty minutes for Kyoko to actually eat and talk at the same time. Kill her now, Homura, she's clearly a pod person!

“I came, I saw, Mitakihara”. Cute.

FINALLY, not quite 40 minutes in we get Homura going “I remember the past, no one else does”. No, sorry, the scenery porn wasn't interesting enough to hold me for the first third of the movie.

I keep wondering if the extreme closeups on Homura are supposed to look like Witch art style as a hint or if it's a coincidence they failed to notice. [At this point I’m pretty sure it’s an ill-thought-out coincidence, as they also do it with Madoka’s eyes at times]

Goddammit, no, punching a button in timestop shouldn't un-timestop the windows. And what kind of lunatic would design windows so high up to open like that at the push of a button anyway? [Answer: Homura, apparently]

The thing that's crazy-making about Fake Mitakihara City is that the real thing is such an insane collage of nonsensical and/or improbable architecture that what parts are “crazy because Labyrinth” and what parts are “crazy because Mitakihara City” is difficult to parse. So when weirdness is supposed to be a hint... er... how am I supposed to tell?

Okay, so I thought Mami and Homura's mega fight sequence was pretty dumb when I happened to watch it in isolation on Youtube, but now I know how it starts, and it goes from “dumb” to 'Dumb with a side helping of the Idiot Version of Just As Keikaku.” [Why did Mami have an invisible ribbon on Homura when she timestopped? What made her that paranoid about Homura? Oh, you wanted your story to make basic sense? You poor fool, you’re watching Rebellion. Abandon hope, all ye who enter here, because there’s no fucking quality or sense here. Ever]

Wait, why did I just hear a Pokeball release sound? [Charlotte made it]

Let me expand on this fight sequence being dumb: I thought it was... like, occurring in a post-apocalyptic town or something, when I watched it on Youtube. Okay, sure, now I know Homura thinks everything is fake so WHOO COLLATERAL DAMAGE GO! So... why's Mami recklessly tearing apart everything, beyond “it looks cool shut the fuck up and enjoy our five billion yen lightshow”? Also, why did Homura re-initiate timestop, given it does nothing to help her in this (utterly retarded) fight? And frankly the choreography is awful, as you spend the first half with no way to get a coherent idea of what's actually happening beyond that they're Shooting At Each Other A Lot. The second half is easier to follow, but makes even less sense as a fight scene, with the bit where they keep trying and failing to shoot each other in the head from point-blank being probably the best example of how Cool But Nonsensical Shit is happening because fuck you enjoy the spectacle!

It was neat to break up the monotony the first... five or so times we were viewing people through reflections or whatever. At this point I'm starting to think whoever headed the art of this movie had an actual psychological problem, though.

I would like for events to at some point progress because the characters make some kind of sense and are working toward actual goals, rather than spouting cryptic nonsense or fighting or whatever because lol. Kyoko and Homura trying to leave the city and it failing is so far the only time anybody has done anything that really made sense.

Dog drug reinforcement? The fuck, crazyland DDR?

Okay, I'll admit, the bus slamming into the ground out of the sky got a laugh out of me. Good on you Rebellion. I legitimately liked... a 0.5 second sequence. I'm over an hour in. Congrats.

No, I'm sorry. This “Isolation Field” bullshit doesn't explain jack. It's a copout. “We're supersciencers, ergo we can make a field that blocks out what amounts to a god and/or law of physics.” No. A million trillion times no. This isn't even a lampshade, as the movie clearly intends for me to take this nonsense seriously.

Oh, and it's one-way! Except when it isn't! Hold up, stop, even if I accept this utter and total bullshit, it fails under the weight of its own bad writing anyway. Who would Homura invite in first? Madoka, you utterly godawful writer. Who is 'the Law of Cycles'? Fucking Madoka. Fail. Terrible. Nonsense. I don't have words for how much I hate this crap.

No, saying “well, you see, Madoka could only come in as a victim and not as the semi-omnipotent Law of Cycles” via Kyubey is not an explanation. Kyubey doesn't know shit. He knows he doesn't know shit, or else he wouldn't be doing the fucking experiment! So having him make random baseless assertions the audience is supposed to accept without question doesn't fucking work because we know he doesn't know that for a fact. In the anime, we could accept that he was an authority figure/expert because he was talking about shit that had been occurring for thousands of years, and it only really broke down once Madoka made her wish and Kyubey was suddenly just the writer talking directly to Homura/the audience, at which point I could basically pretend he's just the most convenient voice actor to play the role or some such vaguely reasonable crap.

Here though, we have several essential plotpoints simultaneously hinging on “I am ignorant! SCIENCE TIME!” that are then being explained by him with “I know everything. Trust me.”

No. This is like the definition of bad writing, and nothing prior to this point has gotten me invested enough in the story to overlook what a colossal fail this is on every level.

One hour and fifteen minutes in, with 40 minutes left to go. The remaining 40 minutes better be the best shit I have ever seen. [Spoiler: Not even slightly]

THIS IS NOT HOW SCIENCE WORKS ON ANY LEVEL. “We don't know this thing exists. It has clearly observable effects, which we know for sure are happening, albeit we don't know its actual mechanism” is what Kyubey should be saying. Not “Oh man this 'law of cycles' thing is a mere hypothesis with no evidence!” I hate this movie.

Kyubey: “Gosh darn all you illogical people.” ← the most illogical being in the universe in this movie.

Now, I'd like to like that we're watching a Witch attacking someone with the Witch as the protagonist, except so far it's been lame and primarily been an excuse to draw Weird Symbolic Shit. There's bits that I like... but only bits. And what the hell is with Kyubey just reappearing somewhere nearby each time he 'dies'?

Okay, I like Kyubey being freaked out by Sayaktavia. Congrats, two times I've actually liked a tiny fraction of the movie.

Sidenote: imagine that every third line or so I instead said SUICIDE METAPHOR INTENSIFIES. Yes, really. [The original anime was kind of bad about its suicide metaphor subtext not being very sub. The movie is far, far more blatant]

GAME OVER. RETURN OF GANON RISE OF HOMURA

So why exactly is the movie condemning Homura rewriting reality to... do... something... vs praising Madoka for rewriting reality to do away with Witches? What has Homura even done that is so contemptible? Why am I supposed to agree with this awful narrative? Oh no, her wish was ‘selfish’ vs Madoka heroically sacrificing herself for the benefit of everyone. And? Has anyone actually had their life made worse? What has she even done, beyond bring Madoka back into humanity and rewrite history to flip some things around? I mean, she even says she intends to destroy all the Wraiths! She’s doing something noble, for sure, so, again: why am I supposed to conflate her with Satan?

And why am I supposed to care, given nothing at any point made even dreamlogic sense?

Also, Kyoko is still in their goddamn class in the 'real world'.

This movie is dumb. This movie is just “look, a bunch of artists were given billions of yen to draw whatever they wanted, and then I guess some writer tried to pretend it made sense?” If you want to watch visually interesting stuff and never, ever have it make any kind of sense -okay, occasionally make some symbolic sense- then okay cool this is a decent movie.

Otherwise?

What the fuck this movie is awful.

Okay: the stinger ending having Homura dancing to Kyubey's corpse? Made me laugh. Seeing Kyubey horrified? Also made me laugh. CONGRATS FOUR WHOLE MOMENTS I KIND OF ENJOYED IN THIS HOUR AND FIFTY-EIGHT MINUTES.

THAT'S LIKE MORE THAN A MOMENT OF NOT-AWFUL EVERY THIRTY MINUTES.

--------------------------

Having slept on it, I've realized I have still more criticisms.

Audio: Back in the anime, I wasn't necessarily a fan of how any given episode used the music available to it, but the music was fantastic on average. I actually had one of the credits/Witch battle tunes as my background music for reading for a while there, that's how good they were on their own. Rebellion continues the trend of putting its music to questionable use, only now the music itself is fairly forgettable and boring. The best stuff tends to be riffing on established 'Madoka music', and even then it's merely okay, not actually engaging in its own right.

I touched upon this indirectly when covering the Mami/Homura fight, but the choreography is weaker in general. The anime had its weak moments, but it also had some great moments, like how it handled Homura's “teleportation”. Rebellion is just... weak, other than it's occasional questionable 'gotcha' moments.

After the Mami/Homura fight, Sayaka swoops in to save Homura and jabber at her a bunch. This is not any kind of natural flow of events, it just sort of happens without an actual explanation. I didn't like the scene when I was watching the movie, but I was sort of half-expecting it to make sense somewhere down the line, particularly with Sayaka indicating she's more in the know than she 'should' be, but no, it just... is a thing that happens, because.

Similarly, why is Charlotte Bebe the only Witch to act as Goddoka's right-hand woman aside from the bizarre case of Sayaka apparently being able to... tap her Witch powers?... even though Madoka's wish prevented Witches from occurring in the first place? What is any of this crap?

Why was Homura able to entrap a 'piece' of Goddoka at all?

If the Incubator's retarded Isolation Field blocked out all outside forces, why does gravity apply? Why does light apply? Why does, you know, myriad physics apply? Oh right I'm applying critical thinking to a retarded plot device. How foolish of me to expect the story to make even the slightest bit of sense. I might then be able to derive some enjoyment from the movie, and that would clearly be a mission fail.

I just. I have no idea why there are people who watched this movie and went “This is a good movie and I enjoyed it” instead of “This is a terrible movie on pretty much every level and I will make sure everyone everywhere forever knows it isn't worth watching even if you're a fan of Madoka.”

I have difficulty imagining it even if I turned my brain off and just took in the wacky art. I have difficulty imagining anyone, anywhere, deriving any enjoyment from it at all in any manner ever.

But people have, somehow.

aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa

#PMMM #Madoka #Argh #Hate

[the-film-bitch]

Oscars Predictions

Best Film and Best Director:

With a record-tying 14 nominations, Damien Chazelle’s all-singing, all-dancing La La Land is a cert for Best Picture. But with so much high calibre competition, less sure is the Directing category, which may well lean for a split-win (as it has in 3 of the last 6 years) and plump for a non-La La choice in order to honour the wealth of directing talent on display this year.

Best Director nominations commend Denis Villeneuve for his stunning philosophical sci-fi Arrival, Barry Jenkins for the phenomenal Moonlight and Kenneth Lonergan for his intricate grief-piece Manchester by the Sea, while this year’s crop also threatens to award Mel Gibson for his comeback-flick Hacksaw Ridge.

It would be comforting to think Villeneuve has a decent shot with Arrival, but given that it is the only Best Picture nom without a representative in the acting categories, it seems clear that the Academy are missing some of its brilliance. Lonergan has perhaps better odds for the well-respected Manchester, but separate Actor and Original Screenplay wins are much likelier.

Whether the Academy will split Best Picture and Directing is as much your guess as mine: if it does, it’ll be Barry Jenkins who takes home the helmer’s award, and if it doesn’t, the shock won’t kill you. If the pre-Oscars awards trend and majority opinion prevail, Moonlight hasn’t done enough to shake the Academy out of their post-coital daze with Chazelle. But it remains my favourite film of the year – so I’m sticking with Jenkins.

Best Actress:

In the 38 years since Meryl Streep’s first Oscars nod, she has been nominated a record 20 times – that’s about once every two years – so it’s not surprising to see her in this category again. She gives a characteristically moving performance as the eponymous aspiring singer in Florence Foster Jenkins, but she’s done much better work, so it’s unlikely this nomination will amount to anything. 

At the other end of the scale, this year sees the first nominations for Ruth Negga (Loving) and Isabelle Huppert (Elle). Neither of their films are nominated in any other category, but there’s no great sense of injustice here: Loving is a great film, but isn’t quite ambitious enough in its other areas to warrant nominations in its own right, while I found Elle, Paul Verhoeven’s French-language film, to be a strange, sadistic movie with the gall to style its ‘rape-myth’ plot as a refreshingly ‘post-feminist’ move – that is to say, it manipulatively insists that its horrific sexual ‘transgressions’ are merely meaningless, über-radical film-play, rather than a dangerously potent message to put out into the world. (You can read much more on why Elle is so deceiving here and here. Paragraphs 5 and 6 in Candice Frederick’s essay are particularly powerful). Nevertheless, both Huppert and Negga are their films’ chief strengths (with Negga in particular producing a stunning performance), so it’s great to see them recognised here.

In contrast, there was no chance Natalie Portman wasn’t going to be nominated for her role as the eponymous Mrs. JFK in Jackie, given the relative ease with which (admittedly good) biopic performances pick up nominations (Eddie Redmayne’s last two Oscars nominations come to mind here). Rightly or wrongly, there’s a tendency to view this type of role as Oscar-baiting: take on a true-story role, put in a good performance, and the character’s pre-existing mystique will do most of the publicity for you. Portman’s depiction of Jackie in the days following her husband’s assassination is certainly good, if a bit earnest, but I think this may well be a nomination earned more on the credit of Onassis Kennedy’s charisma than quality of performance.

On this note, it would be amiss not to point out someone who inexplicably hasn’t been recognised this year: despite her expert steering of the Arrival ship, Amy Adams has been shut out – a cruel move that I simply don’t understand, given the strength of her performance and the shining opportunity this could have been for her. Adams now holds the same number of nominations Leonardo DiCaprio did prior to his 2016 win, but the sympathetic uproar hasn’t really materialised here. While a monumental snub, there is one mitigating factor this year: she probably wouldn’t have won anyway, since it looks almost certain that La La Land’s Emma Stone will win in this category. Stone is the emotional heart of Damien Chazelle’s film, second only to the music, and its comic guard, too, lending the film her natural wit and girl-next-door likability, lest it be accused of self-seriousness. With an unbroken awards run so far, I think this one’s a sure-fire for Stone.

 Best Actor:

This is perhaps the only major category in which La La Land’s awards sweep is almost certain to be interrupted. Ryan Gosling is characteristically charming as jazz aficionado Sebastian, but ends up being outshined by Emma Stone as co-lead, making for a performance that I doubt will be authoritative enough to win here. Much stronger is Denzel Washington’s self-directed turn in Fences, his performance doing much to translate the idiosyncrasies of the late August Wilson’s excellent screenplay – it is at once naturalistic and theatrical – to the silver screen.

Elsewhere, Andrew Garfield gets a merited nod for one of two performances of devout Christians he has given this year (the other being in Martin Scorsese’s snubbed Silence) – this one is better, but only just – and Viggo Mortensen puts in an unexpected, but unobjectionable, appearance for Captain Fantastic, a film that doesn’t quite earn the ‘fantastic’ epithet of its title. No-one, though – not even Denzel – is likely to edge out Casey Affleck, who has cemented himself as a clear critics’ favourite with his career-defining performance as Lee Chandler in Kenneth Lonergan’s Manchester by the Sea. Worn down to a husk by grief, Affleck’s Lee is something of an aberration in this category: his is a performance entirely unrelenting in its sadness. Brief flashbacks show us the man that was to set apart the singular tragedy of the man that is, with Affleck’s performances as both giving us the same haunting appreciation of the extent of devastation as a then-and-now picture of the Great Barrier Reef might do. Despite audible backlash against his nomination, the 2010 accusations of Affleck sexually harassing colleagues (accusations which were settled out of court) don’t look likely to get in the way of his Oscars track – especially with Mel Gibson’s personal nomination having set the bar for the Oscars’ moral relativism this year.

Predictions for other categories, with preferences in brackets: 

Best Supporting Actress

 Viola Davis, Fences

Best Supporting Actor

 Mahershala Ali, Moonlight

Best Original Screenplay

 Manchester by the Sea

Best Adapted Screenplay

 Moonlight

Best Cinematography

 La La Land (although I prefer Moonlight)

Best Animated Feature Film

 Zootopia

Best Documentary (Feature)

13th

Best Foreign Language Film

 Toni Erdmann

Best Music (Original Score)

 La La Land

Best Music (Original Song)

 ‘City of Stars’, La La Land

Best Sound Editing

 Hacksaw Ridge (although I’d like Arrival to win here)

Best Sound Mixing

 La La Land

Best Costume Design

 Jackie

Best Makeup & Hairstyle

 Star Trek Beyond

 Best Production Design

 La La Land

 Best Film Editing

 La La Land

#Oscars #oscar predictions #film review

[andseperand]

thoughts

ive been sitting on this post for the better part of a year. i tried to read through it and make edits, but im going to have to post this as is. maybe ill be able to edit it someday. anyway, this is completely composed of spoilers.

tl;dr: i mostly wrote bitterness about “kung food,” “origins part 1,″ and “reflekta.”

these are my thoughts on what ive watched of the first season of miraculous ladybug (i have watched most of every episode except the last three).

i may be confused or misinformed on some points. some of this is not as serious as other parts, and the writing style is disjointed because i didnt write it all in one go. any links are formatted within brackets (as in [text]).

ordered by the order i initially watched (parts of) the episodes in and indicated by villain name somehow (english, korean, french, french translation, etc.).

stormy weather/climatika

why did alya just toss manon like that? she couldve hurt something just being thrown around with her tiny little bones and joints that lack any significant cushioning. not to mention that her neck is completely unsupported. safety, much?

the bubbler/le bulleur

so the record is fully functional but also survived getting smacked off a building on its edge? wow.

copycat/l’imposteur/the imposter

i get that alya is supposed to be that “go-getter” friend who pushes marinette to be brave, but honestly, if she had waited another minute for marinette to be more ready for making a phone call, this wouldve been less of a mess. yeah, i get the “pushing boundaries to build confidence,” but honestly we could have waited for marinette to stop stalking adrien, too.

i gotta say: marinette is truly fearless. my phone is so suspicious. i would not have the confidence to deliberately touch it with my face and risk contact with who knows what has been on it.

the “moral” or whatever of this episode is kind of unclear? steal someones phone and run into issues with security but then also somehow break into it and get what you want anyway? no, thats not okay. its not that funny that marinette legitimately stole someones phone, and she doesnt even get seriously reprimanded for this.

timebreaker/chronogirl

one of the most pressing questions i have for this episode is why no one thought of using pockets or a bag or something to hold this important watch. hand perspiration is pretty bad for a lot of older and newer mechanical objects alike. why is this clearly-important item treated any different? ive considered both the “tikki is in the bag” (doesnt mean it has to be marinettes bag) and the “girl pockets” (marinette designed her own clothes, though) possibilities, and im still stumped.

mister/monsieur/mr./m. pigeon

how did chloe know what the colors were or even what the embroidery pattern looked like from a pencil sketch? it looked like chicken scratch.

lady wifi

im not sure that “dont violate other peoples privacy” was very well stated, seeing as alya was landed with an unfairly harsh punishment due to corrupt politicians. and how did that get resolved, anyway? was she still suspended? was there even supposed to be a moral in this mess?

the pharaoh/le pharaon

the villain is a pharaoh, continuing the ages-long trend of pretending ancient egyptian culture is just ~so interesting~ and that its portrayal isnt exploitative at all. i cant really say much about this, but i dont like those special ancient egypt episodes of anything.

rogercop

a mess

im pretty sure that this was to save animation budget or something, but why was marinette picking up those croissants off the floor and arranging them so nicely as if it really mattered what she did with them besides cleaning up the spill? i guess ill let it slide if shes trained that way as an advertising thing (though advertising doesnt get a free pass by default just because its strange).

the evillustrator/evil artist/le dessinateur

off topic, but could that tablet also erase or create living beings?

dark cupid/le dislocoeur/heartbreaker

this was still technically a kiss without consent? doesnt really feel all that romantic and whatnot. i cant really get behind this as shipping material.

horrificator

side note: i really liked how chloes english voice actor delivered the lines mockingly announcing mylenes “award” in the beginning.

im not a fan of the “you must kiss as part of acting” plot point. it always gives off those peer pressure vibes from other people and opportunistic vibes from main characters who want to actually kiss the other person.

darkblade/le chevalier noir/the black knight

sabrina is honestly super lucky that marinette made her box have a hole big enough for super tiny animated character wrists or else she wouldve been in a world of more pain.

alya had a platform? im so confused about how this election worked. did they do ballots or some sort of “heads down” in-class vote thing?

the/le mime

seeing as people dont lose their memories of being attacked by the villains, i really dont see how tearing down the eiffel tower (even in an animated show where people are not in the structure at the time) is the best way to minimize traumatic experiences. i get that it was supposed to be a “wow” moment for the plot and just visual effects but not the appeal.

kung food

the second i ever laid my eyes on this name i knew it would be bad, i just didnt know how bad because there were just so many ways it couldve gone with that phrase and i didnt know what to expect until i actually watched the episode. more on this in a bit.

there was literally no point to having the famous chef be related to marinette other than contrived circumstances to get adrien into this episode. im using this as a launching off point for talk of other stuff.

why didnt marinettes parents do anything about a relative coming to their house? this really baffles me because they have their daughter meet an effective stranger with no help.

why didnt marinettes parents tell her what languages the relative spoke? honestly, it kind of seems like they just didnt even care if this would cause her extreme anxiety or anything. you would really think they would have at least discussed this as a family because it was made pretty clear that his visit was actually expected. i thought way higher of their characters until it seemed that they pulled this crap move.

i know it was supposed to be all cute and a bonding moment when adrien came over to translate, but it was even more of a disaster. why did they take a car literally around the corner to get to the hotel? why didnt the chef go directly to the hotel if it was so close? was that adriens car? who was in charge of organizing this event and making sure the contestants didnt end up in the wrong place? how in the world did the chef even get to the bakery? because of the close proximity of the hotel to the bakery, it doesnt make sense that he would go to the bakery instead from an airport or something? unless he was supposed to meet his relatives? which, in this case, was not facilitated at all? so many questions are raised.

i dont speak nor understand mandarin, but im pretty sure adriens wasnt good enough for him to actually be complimented for it. then again, its nothing new to see white people getting complimented for deigning to learn a ~foreign language~ while i get interrogated about my lack of “authenticity” for not speaking “my native tongue,” so i guess the writers were just being realistic.

he bowed...funny story, at least one time i went to a restaurant with other visibly asian people and the apparently-white waiter kept making this weird head bobbing motion every time they left the table and what im saying here is that i know adrien has presumably been learning about culture stuff, but i also know firsthand that creators really love to shove bowing into media whenever asian people show up. (that waiter did give us extra mints, so i guess that was nice.)

sarcasm alert: i love when ~asian~ people have ~asian~ accents. its not like this is a tired gimmick that i dont need to see literally everywhere i turn (oh, wait! according to the english version, it is! hooray for me! this is probably the most exciting thing that has ever happened to me ever! im not being sarcastic at all! or overly sarcastic to the point where im sarcastically putting in that everything ive written in this paragraph is sarcastic because im just so mad! or maybe it definitely is! it probably is all sarcasm!) [bonus sarcasm here]

the chefs english/default dub language fluency was either inconsistent or this was just a straight-up rude portrayal of a nonnative speaker of a language, because adrien didnt seem to wait five seconds (for the chef to even consider the question about what he was cooking) before talking to the chef (and naturally, being a polite person, the chef listened to what adrien was saying), and i feel like it was only for the sake of adrien being ~useful~ because right after that, he talks to the chef in english/whatever language? dont think i didnt notice that his english speaking got “better” after becoming a villain. you know, if they hadnt faked the accent in the first place, they wouldnt have had to hastily cover for the fact that their voice actor couldnt even execute it well.

im sure adrien and marinette tag-teaming to argue with chloe and her racist comments was supposed to be this whole “wow look at that team” deal, but it felt like adrien was shoehorned into this mess sloppily. woohoo for the white boy defending marinette because she cant do it herself or something! i do appreciate when white people help stand up for me, but in this context, it feels off.

i have such a big problem with the “pep talk” adrien gives marinette when she thinks the chef doesnt like her. first thing, white boy explaining things about a person of color to a person of color, and the two people are actually literally related? i think the bouquet misunderstanding was really bizarre, and when did adrien have time to gain all this extensive exposition? the interview when they first arrived was short, and i dont think that both adrien and the chef would be so rude as to exclude marinette from their conversation in the car on the way over. this just comes off as a way to have adrien ~encouraging~ marinette, and its not a very good one.

this supposedly super prestigious competition literally has no security to make sure no one is mucking around behind the scenes, let alone ensure that the contestants arent up to any funny business. because why not. and no cameras around either, because cooking-based television programs never show any cooking, just the tasting and subsequent subjugation by a villain (this is a sarcastic sentence). even if this is supposed to be a featured dish and thus one they dont want to showcase the recipe behind, they could still have those little soundbites interspersed with candid panorama shots (can you tell i have no idea what any of these words mean?). im just going to have to chalk this one up to animation budget and move on.

i know this was just a sort of (intendedly funny) visual thing, but i highly doubt that the objects chloe put in the soup could just go unnoticed, especially since i presume a chef would thoroughly stir (and taste) their cooking, and the soup didnt appear to have properties of decomposing things touching it. otherwise that tasting session would probably have turned out a little messier (i am completely kidding here).

why is the chef being upset about being sabotaged made into a ~cultural~ thing? why is a white boy telling marinette about her ~own~ culture? sheesh, its like you cant just be upset because your shot at a world title was ruined on live television and you have confirmation that you were deliberately sabotaged. yes, chloe did it because shes petty and racist, but the results of her actions could upset anyone! its not just because the chef is chinese! what is the point of saying that? its a pointless throwaway comment! why dont you just find some other way to get the chef alone so he can be become a villain that isnt a) nonsensical and b) making sweeping generalizations about people? (granted, i cant speak to the validity of anything said about cultures, but i sure can comment on why saying such things about them isnt okay regardless).

“kung food” oh my god. this is such a piece of crap name. it is racist. you can literally try to argue against this until youve gone far beyond oxygen deprivation and in a grave but itll still be racist by the time youre done. aside from the pharaoh, there arent a bunch of ~ethnic~ names (not that it would be okay for that to be the case anyway) running around, and yet we get one with this specific villain whose ethnic and national origin is talked to death? okay.

and ive seen this pointed out, but the villain appearance seems to have a kind of anime-inspired design, which is honestly a good laugh because who was just talking about not conflating china and japan again? weeaboos and sinaboos are often in the same boat.

okay, not related, but adrien just had to taste a suspicious substance off the floor. why. there are so many ways to figure out what a substance is before putting it in your mouth. or you could just not do that at all. before this point, they did not appear to suspect a food-related villain, so this couldve ended badly.

another side note: i dont know how that receipt retained its integrity long enough for ladybug to wrap the villain up after dipping it in the soup. do the magical items just have super special properties like extra toughness that allows them to defy the reality of paper receipts? i wonder how many of the things ive talked about in this post have been me marveling at the sturdiness of lucky charm items.

of course this turns into an ~accountability~ lesson for marinette. and chloe doesnt get reprimanded? yeah, she got booted off a panel she didnt even want to be on and no one actually clearly articulated to her that the things she said were absolutely unacceptable? then again, this is a “diversity episode,” so i dont know why my standards are so high.

wow, marinette really needed to have adrien encourage her before going to take a picture with her great-uncle? im going to be generous and allow that she wanted to make sure he would be okay with her ditching him for her much cooler great-uncle because she didnt want him to feel bad about how not-cool he is in comparison. there, you see what i mean about making up story elements? (though im really not much of a writer, oops.)

im so over people making fun of how others dress as a joke. before i realized that i am autistic and reflected back on my life, i didnt realize that i gravitate toward clothing i find comfortable rather than fashionable, and ive always gotten negative comments, ill-intended or otherwise. so i really didnt appreciate marinettes jab at chloe, even if it was to defend herself. it was just unnecessary.

i want to talk about the whole ~chinese representation~ thing in this show. yeah, i know marinette is one of the very few chinese and mixed main characters out there (and there are barely any that are both), but im going to be super honest about this: i dont think shes all that great. i am a big fan of her and this show, but that doesnt make it infallible. the fact that adrien of all people is telling her about her own culture is a huge failing in itself. i dont know everything about my own cultures, but its not cool to have a literal outsider being shown to be the expert on someones culture and be the one to guide them through that. theres barely any portrayal of sino stuff in the show as is, and i hate the way this is only shown as a kind of special episode topic. i would be way more fine with this if this wasnt basically the sole instance of discussion of marinettes heritage. and no, the fact that her mother wears stereotypical clothing doesnt count. at all.

okay, this has been a huge issue for me before and after this point, but it was in this episode that it was made abundantly clear just what we are dealing with. i know that it is completely possible, genetically speaking, for a mixed chinese and white person to have blue eyes. its also completely possible for a chinese person to have gray eyes even without being mixed (i say this because i dont know if her mother is monoracial). however, if you only have two confirmed recurring characters of chinese descent, and their eye colors are ~special~ colors...well, thats kind of iffy there. why is it that the minor chinese character has stereotypical eyes? theyre basically just expanded pupils for all intents and purposes, which is not the problem, because its possible to have irises that are so dark as to make figuring out whether they have a distinguishable brown tint to them really hard. anyway, i suppose i dont want to talk about things ahead in the season, but why is it that the background asian characters get the stereotypical eyes but the main characters who are asian get the special eye colors? (that was a rhetorical question. i know exactly why.)

im pretty that at some point in the creation of this villain name, someone patted themself on the back for being so ~clever~ like “haha kung food geddit? its like kung fu but with food because im actually not that creative and more racist than i would like to openly admit.” okay, i know im being a bit harsh. but its really annoying when one of the few things people “know” about sino people is that kung fu exists. and honestly, i kind of suspected this, but ive seen other people say that the villain more resembles a villain from anime, so...thats kind of disrespectful there...

the/le gamer

i really disliked marinettes combo move names. they all had ~asian~ words like lotus, jade, oriental, etc.

animan

i find the sniffing scene to be kind of creepy. personal space much?

the city has really high quality buses. i cant believe the bus didnt end up backfiring on their plan because if i know anything about buses its that the ones ive seen are probably way older and more decrepit than me.

antibug

how do the earrings work in this setting? as far as i can tell, it would make sense for chloe to have pierced ears and a pair of ladybug imitation earrings that she could put it, but how is it possible that ladybug was able to just pull the earrings off? because that could be a really, really messy situation if they are actually piercings with backings and everything, but is there an explanation for this? magnets, clips, anything?

the puppeteer/le marionnettiste

can that glowing bright red effect that comes from her yo-yo and the power cord being swung around just for the viewers, or can it actually be seen in-universe? or is that a null point because both items are generated by ladybugs magic?

reflekta

this show really didnt need any “haha look a ~guy~ in a dress” jokes. and honestly, this was ill handled (though arguably, its very existence was ill handled). first of all, im not the best judge of this kind of thing, but to me, ladybug felt out of character while mocking chat noir? honestly, marinette doesnt strike me as the type of person to find that kind of situation funny in the first place, so the premise doesnt really hold up in my opinion. i know marinette can make mistakes, but youd really think she would be more open to not thinking this way because she knows what its like to be bullied for other things. moving on... [though, to reiterate]

the way this was not addressed? at all? yeah, ladybug apologized for that one comment at the beginning of their conversation, but then she continued to make jokes at chat noirs expense, and it just wasnt as funny as it was probably intended to be?

i know the whole thing about ambiguous chronology, but there is no reason ladybug wouldnt take chat noirs opinion into account when planning for things anyway. it felt like that part was written specifically so he could “prove” his worth to the rest of the episode and ensure that, yes, he is still allowed to be in it after being turned into a reflekta lookalike, and the whole thing smacks of trying to write out of a corner...that was written into in the first place. if it hadnt gone the route it did with the mocking of appearances, i dont think it would have had to be as convoluted as it ended up being.

i personally dont care for high heels, but i dont get the kind of “fashion cracks” that were being made about them. like yes, high heels can be hard to move in? yeah, it isnt fun being turned into the appearance of someone who isnt you against your will? i just dont understand this gag.

guitar villain

did ladybug really honestly just full-on spray someone in the face with the contents of an aerosol can? im aware that the point was that the hair was in front of his face, but what if some had gotten into guitar villains eyes? dang, what if someone tries to emulate this in real life? ouch.

digital/numeric

kind of done with the spotlight on stalking behavior this show has.

marinette still shows no fear of suspicious screens. she continues to use parts of her face to touch one multiple times, never mind that she literally flings her yoyo all over the place.

stoneheart/coeur de pierre i

did marinette have pierced ears in the first place? shes not shown taking any earrings out, and we dont get that clear a view of her earlobes anyway. that might be deliberate for modeling budget and all.

master fu has brown eyes. so thats like four ~chinese~ characters that are in this show, and the main character and her mother have the special eye colors, and the minor character who is somewhat important to the plotline has non-black eyes, and the minor one-episode character has the black eyes. what a shining example of diversity (no).

anyway this is a good point to say that some things are just not for you. there are things that you just cant be a part of no matter how much you want to be because it just doesnt work that way. and the mess that is the miraculous “mythology” is definitely an example of this. i myself have very little knowledge of anything sino, but i sure as heck can spot that this...”history” thing is so off.

at this point i should probably mention i really dislike master fu as a character in general. just as a single point, apparently hes based off the teacher character in karate kid? i saw somewhere that the creator said he basically made marinette mixed because he was dating an asian person when he was thinking about the show and that marinette is basically his idea of their mixed kid? and back to the eye color thing (again), ive even seen someone with green eyes and blue hair suggest to him that they could be the child of marinette and adrien, and he said theyre like his grandchild? (im not really inclined to try to dig up an iron-clad, indisputably genuine source for this right now, but if youre honestly searching for completely serious, well-researched information in a really good quality post, this is not the post you are looking for.) i have no idea where i was even going with this paragraph.

stoneheart/coeur de pierre ii

why is marinette so invested in her crush on adrien? this couldve been a sweet crush, but no, she has to make it so creepy? leading up to this episode, i really didnt know what to expect because i really thought there would be some sort of explanation for just how extreme the lengths marinette goes to are, but from what i can tell, shes just being super invasive? the ambiguous timeline doesnt really help with this, nor does the fact that the origins episodes were aired at the end of the season. whatever characterization was supposed to be inferred from this feels choppy and unnecessary.

simon says/jackady/jacques a dit

i dont really blame her, but ladybug totally could have reduced the level of adrien distractedness going on here. shes previously shown signs of compartmentalizing ladybug and even having to face the fact that it isnt worth using up her power over adrien, but gosh golly, what gives?

princess/princesse fragrance

ive seen criticisms of how ladybug was written to be overly competent in this episode, which i think is fair since it keeps happening, and its so late in the season by this point that its gotten tired.

volpina

i try not to be too judgmental, but frankly, adrien is not that great of a prize.

anyway, from what i can tell about this episode, i think that there was too much on marinettes flaws, which i really think is a bit much to have in the last chronological episode of a season. its already been established that she makes mistakes with her decisions, but i just thought her unequal prioritization of adrien was too much. it just seemed contrived to squeeze in scenes that the creators wanted to animate regardless of overall context in the show, which is really unfortunate because of how the show becomes a little less chronologically ambiguous at this point.

#lt #kung food #this is a 'kung food' hate blog #wall of text #really long post with low readability #racism text mention (a lot of it) #transmisogyny text mention

[williamlwolf89]

How to Write a Sentence (That’s, You Know, Actually Good)

Contrary to what the experts say, writing isn’t easy for most of us. However, it’s a craft that can be developed with practice.

And at the heart of the craft of writing is one very basic ability…

The ability to write good sentences.

Master the art of sentence-writing and you can paint vivid word pictures that people will rush to read and share. Perfect the art of sentence structure and you’ll set your ideas free. Learn to write great sentences and you’ll conquer the worlds of blogging, marketing, and freelance writing.

The good news is you already know more than you think you do about how to write effective sentences. Some of it you’ll have learned at school, the rest through experience, but it’s all there. You just need to be reminded of it—to formalize some key concepts in your mind so that you can draw upon them at will.

Then you can go wild and crazy as a writer or blogger and let your ideas run riot.

How to Write a Sentence (aka Bite-Sized Morsels of Meaning)

Why is it so important to focus on writing good sentences? Because each one carries a lot of responsibility.

A sentence must simultaneously do two things:

hold the reader’s interest in what it’s saying, and

act as a tiny bridge to the next one.

Imagine your sentences as links in a chain. The stronger you can make each one, and the more tightly you can connect it to the ones on either side, the more powerful your writing will be.

But…what exactly is a sentence, anyway?

Traditionally, proper sentence structure contains a subject (the main person or thing being described) and a verb (the action being taken). Sometimes it also includes a direct object (the secondary person or thing that the action is happening to).

But for our purposes, we’re simply going to define a sentence as the smallest unit of reading that contains meaning.

That means “She stood at the bathroom mirror gazing thoughtfully at her reflection as she thought about how many years had passed since her senior prom” is a sentence…but so is “Uh-oh.”

In a nutshell, sentences act as cohesive bundles of words that make sense together, and that can be threaded together to tell an informational or entertaining story.

And that means focusing less on sentence fragments, independent clauses, comma splices, run-on sentences, etc. and focusing on context.

Because context is everything.

For instance, the rules of grammar will tell you that the words “oh, wonderful” can’t be a complete sentence. “That’s an incomplete sentence,” your English professor will say. “It’s not even a simple sentence. It doesn’t express a complete thought.”

But what about this piece of dialogue?

“Look, Melanie! We’re having octopus steak for dinner again!”

“Oh, wonderful.”

In context, you know exactly what those words mean—right down to the tone of voice in which they are being spoken.

So forget about the technical definition of what sentences are—focus instead on what they do. They relate short, coherent bursts of meaning.

Great. So now that we’re clear on that, how do you construct good ones?

6 Ways to Write Really Freakin’ Good Sentences

The best way to develop an ear for good sentences is to read good writing. A lot of it. Take the advice of one of the best writers of our times:

“If you want to be a writer, you must do two things above all others: read a lot and write a lot.” — Stephen King

There’s no substitute for immersing yourself in the good stuff and letting it sink into your consciousness until it becomes second nature. Ernest Hemingway. Margaret Atwood. Gabriel Garcia Marquez. John Irving. Virginia Woolf. Stanley Fish. Jane Austen. Mark Twain. The list goes on and on.

But in the meantime, how can you improve your sentence-writing skills, hook your readers’ attention almost against their will, and gain the devoted readership you crave?

You concentrate on writing crisply. Juicily. So that every word in a sentence has a good reason for being there.

“Vigorous writing is concise. A sentence should contain no unnecessary words, a paragraph no unnecessary sentences, for the same reason that a drawing should have no unnecessary lines and a machine no unnecessary parts. This requires not that the writer make all his sentences short, or that he avoid all detail and treat his subjects only in outline, but that every word tell.” — William Strunk Jr., The Elements of Style

Here are some great ways to make sure that every word you write earns its place:

1. Use words that pack an emotional punch

The best sentences do more than relay facts and figures—they wake you up and make you feel alive.

You want to offer that gift to your readers.

The way to do that, as Jon Morrow so skillfully explains in this post, is to channel the emotion you want your readers to feel through yourself first.

If you allow yourself to dive deeply into love, anger, fear, joy, or any other emotion, letting it crackle through you and out your fingertips as you write, it will jump like arc lightning from you to the page, then to your readers’ hearts and souls.

Here are some great sentences that do just that:

“There is no greater agony than bearing an untold story inside you.” — Maya Angelou

“Twenty years from now you will be more disappointed by the things that you didn’t do than by the ones you did do, so throw off the bowlines, sail away from safe harbor, catch the trade winds in your sails.” — Mark Twain

“So burn it up, baby. Your ideas are counting on you.” — Jon Morrow

Another way to ensure that your sentences pack an emotional punch is to use power words that evoke specific feelings.

You don’t want to overuse this technique (in which every brilliantly scintillating piece of prose is breathtaking and full of joyous gusto!) or you’ll look ludicrous.

Instead, use it like a spice in those places where you really want to jazz up a sentence or two—definitely in your post’s headline, probably in your subheads, and certainly in those tweetable little nuggets that you’d like to see shared via social media.

And be sure to use more of them in anything you specifically want to incite strong emotion and/or action in your readers, such as a manifesto.

So let those feelings flow, sprinkle some power words with a judicious hand, and make your sentences sizzle!

2. Jolt sentences into life using the active voice

Most sentences are (and should be) written in the active voice, meaning that the subject is doing the action—to, with, or in some other type of relation to the direct object, when there is one. Here’s an example:

Rex ate the crispy bacon.

The passive voice twists things around so that the direct object is acted upon by the subject (and sometimes the subject is left out of the sentence entirely).

The crispy bacon was eaten by Rex.

The crispy bacon was eaten.

The passive voice isn’t technically incorrect—it’s just a weaker way to express a thought. The omission of the subject can also lead to confusion about who the real actor is…which is why the passive voice is so often used in law and politics. 🙂

For instance:

Some unfortunate oversights occurred during the mission.

Who’s responsible for the oversights? We’re not told. (And someone avoids getting fired.)

Again, the passive voice isn’t necessarily wrong, and there may be times you choose to use it. Just do so very sparingly.

3. Stimulate the senses with concrete, colorful description

Just as you can transfer emotions to your readers by feeling them yourself first, you can turn each sentence into a vivid word picture for them by using specific and rich detail to describe what you see in your own mind’s eye.

Use all your senses to dive into what you’re thinking about before you write it down. Make your descriptions concrete and specific. Do this and your sentences will come alive.

So don’t just tell us you were excited to exhibit at a local art show—describe the growing flutter in your stomach as the date approached.

Don’t just say it was a lovely fall day—make us hear the crunching of the red-gold leaves under your feet and smell the woodsmoke from your neighbors’ fireplaces.

In short, make sure that your sentences evoke strong images.

Which of the following two sentences make you feel more like you’re at the event being described?

“I saw some surprising new things at the electronic music convention.”

“The most exciting surprise came on the second day of the electronic music convention, when I watched a button-sized device respond to colored lights with different musical notes.”

The second sentence isn’t better because it’s longer, but because it describes so much more specifically what occurred. It’s much easier for the reader to picture what happened.

4. Vary your rhythm to keep readers guessing

You can easily get caught in the trap of making most of your sentences similar in length. But the steady rhythm that uniformity produces will quickly lull your readers into a comatose state…just like the hum of car wheels against the freeway lulls many a passenger to sleep.

So shake it up. Use short sentences like the previous one to add a percussive bite to your writing, which will keep your audience on their toes. And use longer ones to explain things in more detail or add a flowing quality to your words.

You can—and should—even sprinkle some one-, two-, and three-word sentences here and there for emphasis.

Yep. That’s right. Try it out!

For a sense of what I’m talking about, check out this passage from The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, where a very long (but wonderful!) sentence is bracketed by some much shorter ones:

The boys still listened and watched. Presently a revealing thought flashed through Tom’s mind, and he exclaimed:

“Boys, I know who’s drownded—it’s us!”

They felt like heroes in an instant. Here was a gorgeous triumph; they were missed; they were mourned; hearts were breaking on their account; tears were being shed; accusing memories of unkindness to these poor lost lads were rising up, and unavailing regrets and remorse were being indulged; and best of all, the departed were the talk of the whole town, and the envy of all the boys, as far as this dazzling notoriety was concerned. This was fine. It was worth while to be a pirate, after all.

Or for a brisker, snappier feeling, take a look at the opening of this Smart Blogger post:

Want to know the big problem with blogging?

Most people don’t know there’s a huge chance of failure, so they spend months or even years creating a blog that has zero chance of succeeding. Eventually, they give up and start over, but again, they invest months or even years into creating a second (or third or fourth) blog that doesn’t work.

The reason?

It’s not because they’re dumb. And it’s not because they’re lazy.

It’s because they’re choosing the wrong blog topic.

Granted, if you’re starting a personal blog, the rules are different. Do you enjoy the topic? Is it fun? Those are the only two questions that should matter to you.

But if you’re looking to start a blog that will bring in traffic…

If you want to create a blog that will generate passive income…

You need to choose a viable blog topic that has a fighting chance to succeed.

See how, rather than simply plodding along, these sentences of differing lengths seem to dance?

5. Stick your sentences together like Krazy Glue

Far too many writers generate “stream of consciousness” writing…and simply leave it at that, without tweaking their content further.

Remember, though—good writing doesn’t mean simply plonking words down on the page or screen as they come out of your head. You need to connect your sentences to each other so that your readers keep going.

Each thought must lead naturally to the next. Each sentence must create desire for the next. Otherwise your readers will drift away.

Think about biting into a slice of pizza. The hot cheese stretches out as you pull the slice away from your mouth, and you have to nibble your way up the entire string to get to the rest of your pizza. 🙂

Another way to think about it is to imagine each sentence as a mini cliffhanger—you want to compel your readers to move on to the next sentence to find out what happens next!

You can do this in several ways. One is to work on your transitions (and, but, or, since, therefore, etc.) so that we see how your ideas are causally and logically related. (And incidentally, feel free to start sentences with conjunctions when you blog, no matter what your English teachers might have told you.)

For example:

You can definitely improve at sentence-writing. And the best way to do that is to practice.

Notice how you see the word “and” out of the corner of your eye as you’re finishing the first sentence? Suddenly you don’t have the closure that you thought you did, and you feel the urge to read on.

Another way to keep your readers moving from one sentence to the next is to create “open loops” by withholding enough information to make them keep reading:

Mary desired only one thing. She wanted to be taken seriously.

You can also ask questions, which naturally lead the reader to continue in search of the answers.

Why should you hire a tax professional? Because doing so can save you a lot of money.

Another tactic is to start a list, which also keeps the reader moving along from item to item.

Here are four great ways to keep your children busy on rainy days. First, save up old cereal boxes as you empty them…

Take a look at the following paragraph and see if you can identify which of the above techniques are being used and where.

Why should you hire a tax professional? There are three main reasons. The first is that he or she will be up-to-date on any new rules and regulations. The second is that hiring someone to do it all for you saves you precious time. But the last reason is by far the most important. You’re simply leaving money on the table at tax time if you don’t hire a pro.

Did you catch them all?

6. Ruthlessly eradicate any fluff or flab

Make sure that your sentences contain no unnecessary words.

It’s easy to include words that don’t contribute much because when you write a first draft, you’re usually transcribing your sentences straight from your brain as you would speak them out loud…and most conversation is replete with meaningless “filler” words.

First of all, be on the alert for redundancy. Instead of telling us that something is shorter in length, just tell us that it’s shorter.

Secondly, look out for modifiers—words that add to or alter the meaning of another word—that seem to amplify what you’re saying but don’t actually add much. You don’t need to say that something is very pretty—simply saying that it’s pretty does the trick. Even better, go back to point #3 above and be more concrete and precise. Maybe it’s attractive or eye-catching or stunning instead.

That’s not to say you can never use words like very, really, absolutely, etc…just save them for when you truly do need to add some emphasis. (Like I just did with “truly.”)

Watch for overly lengthy phrases that can be tightened up. Don’t tell us that the position of management is that we should start hiring again. Instead, tell us that management’s position is to start hiring again. Or even better, that management will start hiring again.

In short, look for ways to trim the fat from your sentences, leaving them as lean and expressive as possible…no, wait. Leaving them lean and expressive. 🙂

You Now Know How to Write a Sentence. Now It’s Time to Sentence Yourself to Success…

The world of a freelance writer is a harsh, unforgiving environment.

If your words don’t pack a hefty enough punch, they’ll fizzle out and die.

Knowing this, you’re committed to doing what it takes to become a better writer—even if that means returning to fundamentals and focusing on your sentences.

But don’t worry, you’re not starting from scratch.

You’ve been reading—and possibly writing—for many years, and you’ve already got a better head-start on this than you realize. Want to know how I know that?

Because this post made sense to you. You already grasp the ground rules of writing good sentences—you just need to practice thinking about them consciously.

You already know how to assemble sentences into paragraphs, paragraphs into posts.

Learn to write great sentences and the effects will ripple through the rest of your writing.

Your paragraphs will become more powerful. Your posts will become, dare I say, more epic.

Now go out there, and practice creating those perfect blocks of meaning.

Then use them to build something truly extraordinary.

The post How to Write a Sentence (That’s, You Know, Actually Good) appeared first on Smart Blogger.

from SEO and SM Tips https://smartblogger.com/writing-sentences/

[juniperpublisherspbworld]

Juniper Publishers| Relationship of Positive and Negative Affect with Depression in Clinical and Normal Group

Journal of Psychology-JuniperPublishers

Introduction

Nature And Concept Of Depression

Depression is probably the most common psychological disorder and one that receive most attention. Depression is a form of what is known as mood or affective disorder because it is primarily concerned with change in mood. Some are of normal fluctuation and other meet the definition of clinical problem. Negative affectivity is a common component to depression and low positive affectivity is related to depression. They attribute negative outcomes to lasting i.e. internal causes such as their own traits or lack of ability, but attribute positive outcomes to temporary i.e. external causes such as good luck or special favors from others. As a result such persons perceive that they have little or no control over what happens to them. We often hear that someone whom we thought happy and well settled suddenly starts talking about ending his or her life. Such person exhibits a disturbance in mood. When we know that the talk of suicide was a result of failure in business deal the person would then be described as being emotionally disturbed. Mood disorders are disorders of emotion of sufficient intensity and duration which require immediate psychological and medical attention. But depressive disorder should be distinguished from depressed mood. All of us become sad grieved and deprived at one time or other time in life. These feeling occur during cloudy weather due to death in the family, losing a job or honors, failure in relationship or major financial loss. However, there are temporary phases which represent a short term response to stress and in due course of time, we usually overcome these feelings. This is normal depression that most of us feel occasionally. This is often transitory and time bound and often a period of genuine introspection .But when this feeling of sadness is large or we do not get pleasure from daily activities and feels continuously sad it would result in depression. Depression must be taken seriously because of high rates of suicide associated with it. Clinical depression is something we feel for a day or two before feeling better. In true depressive illness the symptoms last for two week if it is not treated it may last for five months or sometimes years As many as 40% of older individuals who have chronic health problems or confined in hospital are depressed [1]. Moreover, people with a dementing disorder such as Alzheimer's may also be depressed. In addition 30% of patients with dementia of Alzheimer's type who are estimated to have a supreme posed major depressive disorder, many more have some symptoms of depression that interferes with lives [2]. Depression is much more than blues, clinical depression can affect every aspect of life such as work, home, family, friends etc. Depression may be a reaction to other illness such as cancer, heart attack. Finally depression may be caused by an illness itself such as stroke where neurological changes have occurred. One in four women and one in six males will suffer from depression at same point in their life. Men & women sometimes show depression differently. Men are more likely to experience irritability, sleep problem, fatigue etc. whereas women tend to have overt sadness and feeling of worthlessness and guilt when depressed. Depressed prone people often set rigid perfectionist goals for themselves that are impossible to attain. Their negative expectations are so strong that even if they experiences success in specific tasks they anticipate failure the next time. They screen out successful experiences that are not consistent with their negative selfconcept. The thought content of depressed individuals centers on a sense of irreversible loss, which results in emotional states of sadness, disappointment and apathy. When a psychiatrist makes a diagnosis of a patient's depressive illness, he or she may use a number of terms such as bipolar, clinical, endogenous major depression, melancholic, seasonal, affective or unipolar disorder to describe. Beck challenged the notion that depression result from anger inward. Instead, he focuses on the content of the depressive's negative thinking and biased interpretation of events [3]. In an earlier study that provided much of the backbone of his theory, Beck [3] even found cognitive errors in the dream content of depressive clients. Becks [3] write about the cognitive triad as a pattern that triggers depression. Beck Depression Inventory (BDI) was design as standardized device to assess the depth of depression. The items are based on observation of symptoms and basic belief of depressed people.

Factors for Depression

The chance that any person may develop a particular disorder is related to risk factors in the environment, that person's biological vulnerabilities and the presence or absence or factors that promote resilience. Risk factors affecting depression include-heredity, age, gender, negative life events and lack of social support. Heredity-An important risk factor for mood disorder is heredity. According to Plomin et al. [4] studies of twins and families clearly suggest a genetic component in both major depression and biological disorders. The importance of heredity in mood disorder is shown by the strong association between the closeness of the biological relationship and the like hood that if one of them has a mood disorder, the biological relative will also be diagnosed with such a disorder. For example there is a much greater risk of developing a measure developing a measure depression if one's identical twin has had this disorder than if one's parent, brother or sister has experienced it. The chances of developing the disorder are even less if a person has no close relative that has ever been given this diagnosis. Those having relatives with a bipolar diagnosis have almost three times as great a chance of developing as major depression as those who have no close relative with either a diagnosis of depression or bipolar depression. Families' studies have shown that the younger in age people are when their first major depression occurs, the more likely it is that their relatives will also experience periods of depression. According to kender et al. [5], A study comparing monozygotic (MZ) and dizygotic (DZ) twin investigated the effect of genetic similarity on such questions ; what are called the negative symptoms of depression(change in weight, appetite and sleep) and whether or not the depression recurred after the first diagnosis, both seemed more influenced by heredity than by events in the twin’s lives because these symptoms occurred more often in both members of the MZ twin pairs than they did in the DZ pairs. In contrast, within the group experiencing recurrent episodes of depression, the actual number of episodes seemed to be related to stressful life experiences not shared by the other twin of the pair, rather than two heredity. Age-Another factor for depression is age. The risk for a first episode of any degree of depression is highest in women between the ages of 20 and 29. For men, the similar risk period is between the ages of 40 and 49. In addition to age, another factor is year of birth, or the birth cohort to which a person belongs. Gender- one of the greatest risk factor for depression is simply being female. Women are more likely to consult physicians or mental health experts and to take a psychology view their problems than they are to see them only in terms of physical symptoms. one possible explanation is that while women is general receive more social support than do men, they are also expected to offer more support because support giving often involves them in the problems and stressors experienced by others, women may on average experience more stress than men. According to Paykel [6] during age period from 25-45, married women have a particularly highly rate of depression, while unmarried women in the age bracket have a much lower rate, more similar to the rate for men. This difference may reflect the greater stress for married women from both heavy child-care responsibilities and support provision for extended families, in addition to job stress. According to Beekman et al.[7] , low income and economic need are additional stressor that affect women more often than men and may be related to the higher rate of depression. Life Events- Environmental f actors such as life events, especially a pileup of stressful events in a short time period, may play a significant role in producing an episode of depression, especially in vulnerable people. According to Kender et al. [5] the association between the stressful life events and the onset of major depression decreases as the number of previous depression episodes Increases. Many stressful life events are associated with relationships in the person's social network. According to kender et al. [5], one studies of twins found that more than half of all personal stressful life events were rated as being in some way dependent on the person involved rather than on factors outside of the persons 'control. Lack of social support-The negative of life events related to close personal relationships is made even stronger because it is usually accompanied by a decrease in social support. Social support, the belief that one is cared by others who are also available to provide help or emotional support when needed is an important protection from depression. Behaviors of others that convey criticism or imply that people unworthy of love or friendship are more likely to be .Related to depression than is the mere absence of support (Harris 1992). According to Prigerson et al. (1999), one close relationship that is generally considered to provide support is marriage. Both divorce and the poor quality of an ongoing marriage are associated with depression as well as with worsened mental and physical health in general.

Positive and Negative Affect; Pana

Researchers have proposed the existence of two broad mood factors- Positive and negative affect [8,9]. Extensive evidence demonstrates that two broad mood factors -Positive affect & Negative affect are the dominant dimensions in self report mood [8,9]. Although their names might suggest that they are the opposite poles of the same dimension. Positive & negative affect are in fact highly distinctive dimensions' that can be meaningfully represented as orthogonal (uncontrolled) factors. Both mood factors can be measured either as a state or as a trait. Our focus will be on the trait, which Tellegen [9] has termed negative affectivity (NA) and positive affectivity (PA). Negative affect is a general factor of subjective distress and subsumes a broad range of negative mood states, including fear, anxiety, hostility, scorn, and disgust. Mood states related to depression such as sadness and loneliness also have substantial loading on this factor. At the trait level, NA is a broad and pervasive predisposition to experience negative emotions that further influence on cognition, self concept and world view [8]. In contrast, PA is a dimension reflecting ones level of pleasurable engagement with the environment. High PA is composed of term reflecting ones enthusiasm , energy level, mental alertness interest joy and determination, whereas low PA is best defined by descriptors reflecting lethargy and fatigue . It is noteworthy that state of sadness and loneliness also have relatively strong loadings on the low end of this factors [8,9] trait PA is a corresponding predisposition conducive to positive emotional experiences; It reflects a generalized sense of well-being and competence, and of effective interpersonal engagement. Watson et al. [8] found that several available PA and NA scales lacked psychometric soundness. Thus, Watson et al. developed a brief and easy way to measures of these emotions called positive affect and negative affect schedule (PANAS). The study of positive and negative affect has some important applied outcomes also for e.g., some researchers have suggested that the PANAS may be a useful instrument in applied and research situations where the differentiation of anxiety and depression is important [

8

]. Furthermore PA has been found to correlate strongly and positively with extraversion and NA with neuroticism [

8

]. Trait positive affect scores are related to social activities [

8

]. Concluding their views of previous research literature Pettit et al. (2001) assume that "positive affect may produce profitable outcome in multiple areas, ranging from the enhancement of learning to the amelioration of psychological distress." In this context, the study examines the difference in level of PA and NA between the patients diagnosed with depression and normal subjects i.e. non depressed individuals.

Depression and Pana

The cognitive model of depressed states that certain negative cognition can maintain state of depression. There is good evidence that in clinically depressed group mood affects the relative accessibility of positive and negative cognition. Thus negative cognitions appear to produce depression, and conversely depression increases the probability of just these cognitions which will cause further depression. Thus, this reciprocal relationship between depression and cognition may found the basis of vicious cycle which will perpetuates and intensify depression. Moreover, positive and negative mood state effects on memory and is an important dimension of cognitive vulnerability to depression. The state of mind-model (SOM model) Schewartz & garamoni [

10

] provided a framework for assessing the balance between self reported positive and negative affects in a sample of 30 clinically depressed patients and 30 healthy control subjects. The SOM Model proposed that healthy functioning is characterized by optimal balance of positive (P) & negative (N) cognitions or affects. [P1 (P+N)] and that psychopathology is marked by deviation from the balance.

Review of Literature

Emotions based theories of psychopathology proposed that depression is characterized by increased Negative affect and decreased Positive affect. This model has been supported by various studies.

Tellegen [9] specially tested this model by factor analyzing measures of anxiety, depression; NA & PA. The results were generally consistent with the model. As expected, the NA & PA scales each defined a factor. The anxiety and depression scales has significant loadings on both factors; however, the anxiety scales loaded more strongly on the NA factor, where as the depression scale was a much better marker of low PA.

Blumberg & Izard [11] used self report mood scales to predict scores on measures of depression and anxiety. Several of the negative emotion scales (most notably sadness and fear) contributed to the prediction of both measures, but the positive emotion scales (joy & interest) added significantly only to the prediction of depression. The mood data therefore suggest that PA may be an important factor in differentiating anxiety from depression [8,9]

Hall in (1977) obtained diagnostic data and clinician's ratings of anxiety and depression on a sample of 108 male outpatients. She found ratings and diagnosis of anxiety to be significantly correlated with NA but not PA where as ratings and diagnoses of depression were more highly related to (Low) PA than NA.

Bouman & Luteijn [12] examined three groups of patients (a) Major depressives, (b) Dysthymics, and (c) No depressives. scores on a number of mood and personality scales were factor analyzed, and two factors were extracted and interpreted as NA and PA .Consistent with the model outlined earlier, The major depressives has significantly lower PA scores than dysphonic patients, who were, in turn, lower on PA than the no depressive group. The later data don't permit any comparison between anxiety and depression.

David Watson, Lee Anna Clark & Grey Carey [8] provide the most comprehensive test of the model to data. They examined the relation of trait PA and NA scores to symptoms and diagnosis of depression and anxiety in a clinical patient population. They predicted that NA scores would be significantly correlated with anxiety and depression .whereas, PA scores would be associated only with later (depression).

Clark & Watson [8] predicts that individuals diagnosed with depression were expected to show significantly lower scores on positive affect than patients with anxiety disorders based on an expected narrowing of affective space under conditions of uncertainty .Those in the anxiety group were predicted to show significant inverse correlation between PA and NA. The depressed group was predicted to have a low, non significant correlation between PA and NA leading to a third prediction; that the inter correlation between PA and NA would be more strongly linked in persons suffering from an anxiety disorders in comparison to those with a depressive disorders.

Zautra et al. (1997),"participants with anxiety disorders appeared to exhibit a more simplified affect structure and suggested by the significant inverse correlation between PA & NA. The depressed participants displayed no such narrowing of affective range. In fact the depressed group exhibited a correlation that was suggestive of no relationship between positive and negative effect.

According to Jason Williams, Frenk Peeter's and Alex Zautra (2004),"Anxiety and depression differ both in level and in the relationship between PA and NA. Depressed participants also showed higher NA then their anxious counterparts, also the groups differed in affective relationship. On the bases of the fore research studies, the following research question was formulated.

Research question

Does clinically depressed group and normal group (nondepressed group) differ in the level of PA & NA?

Objective

To examine the difference in the level of PA & NA between the patients diagnosed with depression and normal subjects i.e. non depressed individuals

Hypothesis

Individuals diagnosed with depression are expected to show lower scores in positive affect than non depressed individuals.

There will be significant difference on negative (NA) between clinically depressed group & non depressed individuals

In Clinically depressed groups the relationship between low positive affect and depression would be stronger as compared to non depressed group

Methodology

Participants

The sample for the present study comprised of 60 participant. Among them N=30 belongs to normal group and N=30 belongs to clinical group. The participants male and female were in the age range of 18-41 yrs in both the groups.

Measures

In the present study the investigator used the following tool to measure the level of depression and positive and negative effect of the individuals.

Beck Depression Inventory -II (BDI-II)

The level of depression of individuals were measured through questionnaire of Beck Depression Inventory-II developed by Beck et al 1961 this inventory contains 21 items to measure the behavioral manifestations of depression. The range of scores varies from 0-63.

Scoring

As we know that in BDI-II, there were 21 categories, each category describe particular manifestation of depression and has a series of 4 self evaluative-statements which are assigned value of 0-3. The subject has to choose one statement from among group of 4 statement in each question that best describe how he/ she have been feeling during the past few days. The statement on which subject put a tick mark is given a score according to series for e.g., if put a mark on statement 1 given 0, statement 2 given 1, statement 2 and 3 given 2 & 3 scores respectively, thus a high score on test indicates high depression where as a low score on test on test indicate normal ups and downs.

Reliability

The BDI II discusses several kinds of reliability measures that were developed based on two samples, the first was a clinical sample of 500 out patients from various psychiatric institutions in the USA. The second sample was comprised of 120 college students.

Internal consistency

An analysis of internal consistency yielded a cronbach's alpha of .92 for the outpatients and .93 for the students.

Test-retest reliability

The test-retest reliabilities were calculated and yielded an average correlation of .93.

Validity

Several validation studies assess the BDI-II similarity to other kind of depression - related scales. According to Arbisi's (2001) the correlation between BDI-II and BDI-IA was quite high i. e. .93 suggesting that these measures yield similar pattern of scores. BDI-II scores yielded correlation of .60 with Beck Anxiety Inventory and .68 with Beck Hopelessness scale (BHS).

Positive and Negative Affect-Schedule (PANAS)

PANAS was used to measure a broad range of affective states of adolescents. it was developed by Watson, Clark & Tellegen [

8

] . It is used to measure the two affects; Positive affect (PA) and negative affect (NA). It is a self report scale with twenty, 5- point Likert type item, ranging from very slightly or not at all to extreme.

Scoring

Scoring is simple, subjects were asked to rate each item on the extent to which it applies to them from 1=very slightly or not at all,2=a little, 3=moderately,4=quite a bit and 5= extremely, it has 20 specific affects (10 items separately for PA and 10 for NA).PA includes (1,3,5,9,10,12,14,16,17 and19) Active, alert, attentive, determined, enthusiastic, excited, inspired, interested ,proud, strong. NA includes (items 2,4,6,7,8,11,13,15,18 and 20) Afraid, scared, nervous, jittery, irritable, hostile, guilty, ashamed, upset, distress. Sum of these items separately PA and NA indicates high and low on emotional wellbeing respectively.

Reliability

The internal consistency of PANAS was determined by cronbach's alpha coefficient. The alpha reliabilities for both scales are high generally ranging from .83 to .90 for PA and from .85 to .90 for NA. Validity Convergent construct validity was high ranging from .90 to .95 for PA and from.92 to .95 or NA.

Procedure

After taking the authority letter from Department of psychology, we took the permission from chairman of psychiatry department of JNMC. After that 30 clinically depressed patient both male and female were identified. Adopting the criteria of score taken from BDI-II 30 non-depressed participant (Normal subjects) were identified and were explained the purpose of the present study. A good assured the subject’s that their responses will be kept confidential and will be used only for research purpose. All the measures were administered to normal group and clinical depressed group. Participants were asked to fill out the questionnaire. Each questionnaire was followed with the gap of 10 min. Then after collecting data subjects were thanked.

Statistical analysis

In the present study, the data was analysis by using t-Test and Pearson's Product Moment correlation.

Results

Table 1

shows that there is significant difference between clinical group and normal group on positive affect (t=7.92). Normal group scored significantly high mean scores on PA (Mean=35.43, Sd=5.84) than clinical group (Mean=22.20, Sd=7.53). Thus, hypothesis I is accepted.

Table 2

It is clear from the above table that there is significant difference on negative affect between the mean scores of clinical group and normal group (t=12.15). Clinical group scored significantly high mean score (Mean= 34.93, Sd=6.20) than normal group (Mean=17.3, Sd=5.76). Thus, the hypothesis II is accepted.

Table 3

shows that positive and negative affect are significantly correlated with depression in normal as well as clinical group. In clinical group there is high correlation with positive and negative affect (PA=.87, NA=.81) as compared to normal group (PA=.65, NA=.69) respectively. However in clinical group the relationship is stronger as compared to normal group. Thus, our hypothesis III is also accepted.

Discussion and Conclusion

Results generally support our predictions and are consistent with previous research in this area. The results obtained have indicated that positive and negative effects are significantly correlated with clinical group as well as normal group. Results obtained from present study have also indicate that clinical group scored significantly higher mean score on NA & low mean scores on PA than normal group. As predicted by Clark the finding of the study is also according to the prediction made by Clark & Watson [

8

]. Another distinguished feature of the study is that normal participants scored larger on both NA & PA which gives the insight that low Positive score is the only specific feature of depressive group. The study thus strongly suggests that positive and negative affect and depression are related and that high negative and low positive affect may be risk factors for depression. The findings of the study may be fruitful in clinical setting for predicting treatment outcome, assessment and diagnoses. Moreover improvement in depressive group can be made by reducing negative affect and increasing positive affect.

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The Suicide Squad: James Gunn Talks the Creative Freedom of That R-Rating

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A couple of days. That’s how long director James Gunn had to wait before Warner Bros. and DC came calling in 2018. Up until that moment, it’d been a pretty turbulent July. The iconoclastic filmmaker who made audiences cry over a talking tree in Guardians of the Galaxy was just fired by Disney—temporarily as it turns out—and his name was being besmirched on social media. Yet less than 72 hours after that dismissal, WB was making him an offer that could change the face of DC superhero movies forever.

“It happened immediately,” Gunn says with a hint of lingering chagrin. “We started talking about what the project would be. The first thing that was brought up was Superman, but I didn’t know if I wanted to do that.” 

So the studio suggested a once-in-a-lifetime alternative: make whatever you want. Gunn was free to adapt “anybody out of the DC catalogue.” Somehow though, with an entire gleaming multiverse at his disposal, Gunn only had eyes for the filthiest D-listers this side of Krypton. He only wanted to make The Suicide Squad.

The team of supervillain rejects has of course been adapted before, with David Ayer’s divisive Suicide Squad coming out in 2016. The earlier movie was a hit too, grossing more than $700 million and triggering a small bout of jealousy in Gunn, who even then thought that was the only DC property he ever wanted to do. But the film left something to be desired for many fans and critics.

To be clear, there are things Gunn absolutely loves about Ayer’s movie. How could he not, when he incorporated so many of the 2016 film’s cast into his own? In Gunn’s mind, Margot Robbie was born to play Harley Quinn, which he hopes to only further highlight by bringing out her “true lunacy” in the new movie. Viola Davis’s Amanda Waller, meanwhile, was the first character he decided to put in his own film. But Gunn is unambiguous on one point: his The Suicide Squad is going to be its own 31 flavors of weird.

“It wasn’t something to contrast the first movie,” Gunn says. “It wasn’t about going through a checklist of this is good, this is bad, this works, this doesn’t… but the concept that John Ostrander started with in the comics, that these are B-grade, shitty superheroes who are considered disposable by the U.S. government and are sent out on these black-ops missions, where they probably won’t make it but who gives a shit because they’re pieces-of-shit prisoners without many skills?”

That is the movie Gunn wanted to make. And he did so with R-rated glee.

Engineered as a standalone epic that might (or might not) be a sequel to the 2016 movie, Gunn’s The Suicide Squad is, in essence, meant to be a spiritual continuation of comic book writer Ostrander’s seminal 1980s run with the team. Davis’ Waller is still the government’s shady lady pulling the strings and recruiting incarcerated sad sacks to do the wet work law enforcement won’t; her point man on the ground remains Rick Flag (Joel Kinnaman), a straight arrow surrounded by coerced supervillains, including familiar faces like Robbie’s delightfully demented Harley, plus new ones such as Idris Elba’s Bloodsport.

The genre Gunn and his cohorts compare this to is war movies, but who they’re going to war against isn’t exactly clear. With that said, recent marketing revealed a comic book deep cut, with the 1950s space alien, Starro, running amok at kaiju-size.

“Starro is hilarious because he’s ridiculous. He’s a giant, cerulean blue starfish, but he’s also fucking terrifying,” Gunn says. “When I was a kid I thought that was the scariest thing of all time… and I think that exemplifies what this movie is: it is ridiculous and it’s also terrifying, and serious. So he works really well as the villain of the movie—as one of the villains, actually.”

Ironically, the real antagonists of The Suicide Squad might simply be the flick’s main characters, and Gunn is using the motley crew to unleash his distinctive voice. With an absurdly large cast to pick from, the director has carte blanche from WB to kill any character he wants, and to embrace any level of weirdness. And unlike the 2016 film, or his previous Guardians movies, The Suicide Squad is a big budget superhero flick with an R-rating. A first for Gunn.

“Most of my movies have been R-rated,” Gunn laughs when we mention this. He is, after all, a filmmaker who cut his teeth at indie grindhouse distributor Troma Studios, and has a history with tongue-in-cheek horror movies like Slither. But whether it’s making an R-rated Suicide Squad movie or a PG-13 Guardians picture, it’s all the same to him: telling the biggest-ass version of a campfire yarn.

“This is simply a little bit of a higher age bracket,” he explains, “and my audience is a little bit different. They can see a shark tearing someone in half, they can see a penis. It doesn’t matter.” Even so, there remains a sense of human connection among a number of broken Squad members. And those without that vulnerability still allow the storyteller to broaden the moral spectrum he’s playing with.

“I think you know from the beginning of the first Guardians that most likely, in his heart, Peter Quill is good, Gamora is good, Rocket is good, Drax is good.” But with the Suicide Squad, “some are not good people. They’re bad people. It’s less sentimental in that way. King Shark is much less sentimental than Groot.”

And some of these bad people will die in presumably horrible ways. Not that Gunn is killing his darlings lightly.

“The first thing I had to do was ignore the potential blowback from killing a character,” Gunn says. Instead he focused on following the natural progression of the story, and the natural progression of a character’s arc. “I’m just the servant of the story, so whatever the story says is what I’m going to do, no matter what the repercussions are for anything. I believe in the truth of the story. I believe that there was a story out there that needed to be told that I don’t have any control over.”

Perhaps ceding that control is the greatest advantage he’s discovered from making a gross, foul-mouthed superhero movie exactly to his liking.

“I wanted to do the things that other spectacle films haven’t been able to do,” Gunn says, “which is really take my time and investigate these characters, get to know them, focus on the character aspects, focus on who they were, and deal with time in a different way than it’s been dealt with in these movies.”

Gunn is thus able to let his movie breathe in a way that’s unusual for the superhero genre, but is in line with the more adult-oriented filmmaking he loved as a child. The Suicide Squad may be a war movie, but for Gunn it’s a specific type of throwback. Quick to name The Dirty Dozen and The Great Escape, he becomes audibly excited when discussing those 1960s “war-caper” films from his youth. Recapturing that men-and-women-on-a-mission aesthetic is as much the appeal of the movie as honoring Ostrander’s comics. He even refers to Elba’s Bloodsport as his Steve McQueen.

“He’s the unsentimental portrayal of a 1960s action hero but without the moral repercussions of those characters,” says Gunn. Also, he notes, Bloodsport is the guy who shot Superman with a kryptonite bullet. “How cool is that? And also, what a dick!” When contrasted with Robbie’s Harley Quinn, Gunn even likens the pair’s energy to an Abbott and Costello routine, only now Costello might kill you with a bat.

But then, each of the Squad members represent their own genre. They also each leave the door open for further exploration. Hence Gunn’s next project is still not Guardians 3, but rather an HBO Max TV series starring one of the nastiest pieces of work in The Suicide Squad: John Cena’s Peacemaker.

Describing the jingoistic flag-waver as if Marvel’s Captain America took a really far-right turn, Gunn saw Peacemaker as the perfect jumping off point when HBO approached him about doing a series.

“I think that the actual inspiration for Peacemaker was the shitty 1970s Captain America TV shows that I loved when I was a child,” Gunn says. “And I think Peacemaker exemplifies a lot of things about society that are going on politically, and what people’s beliefs are about America and the world. So being able to tell those stories that are slightly more socially conscious in their essence, but also outlandish, he lends itself to that.”

Exploring this week-to-week with Cena—an actor whose range Gunn believes audiences have only seen a fraction of—is irresistible. In fact, Peacemaker might mark another significant turning point in Gunn’s career.

Says the filmmaker, “I love doing Peacemaker. I could see just making TV shows after Guardians 3. It’s a possibility.”

Three years since Gunn’s one very bad week, the possibilities now seem limitless.

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The Suicide Squad opens on Aug. 6 in theaters and HBO Max. We’ll have more from our interview with James Gunn in the coming weeks.

Check out more on The Suicide Squad in the latest issue of Den of Geek!

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One Man’s Quest to Watch the First Day of the NCAA Tournament, Against All Odds

Three months ago my boss came to me and told me I would be covering a conference beginning on March 21. I’m sure I blankly looked at up her with my dead, beady eyes and agreed to it. It was three months away. Who cares about something that’s going to happen in three months.

Two weeks ago my wife asked me if I had put any thought into a March Madness bracket.

Oh shit. Does that start on the third week of March or the fourth? THE THIRD WEEK OR THE FOURTH?!

Of fucking course. March 21. First day of the tournament. Basketball, alcohol, legalized gambling….. CONFERENCE?!

That dog won’t hunt.

So here I am, in some God forsaken state, in a God forsaken convention hall, listening to much more successful men and women talk about their accomplishments that I couldn’t begin to understand. But am I a quitter? Am I just going to sit here and let the greatest four days of the year slip through my fingers?

Am I not going to watch any of the first two rounds of the March Madness tournament? Of course not. I’m no communist.

I decided to keep a running diary of my trials and travails of the first day of the tournament and my desperate attempts to stay connected on one of the greatest sports days of the year.

And yes, I’m well aware this is a complete ripoff of a Bill Simmons creation, but I’m sure he never did one for the first day of the tournament (don’t Google that please).

7 a.m. – Alarm blares. Wake up in the heartland in a terribly humid Marriott. It’s the best day of the year, baby, and being stuck in a conference will NOT stop me from indulging in my basest desires of losing money, making rash, last-minute decisions, and watching exploited college athletes perform for my amusement.

7:30 a.m. – First hurdle of the day. I’m not registered for the conference. After a 10 hour trip yesterday that included a three hour delay in Philadelphia and a 3 hour delay in Charlotte, I’m ready to quit and go home. Nobody would miss me here. I could drop dead in the lobby and they’d roll me into the nearest dumpster. Sadly, the person checking me in is accommodating and non-combative, and she quickly rectifies the situation and gets me checked in for the next four days. God damnit. I could taste sweet freedom for a mere moment.

7:35 a.m. – First presentation of the day begins. Did you know there are treatments that could be the next big thing when it comes to treating inherited diseases?! Who cares! (unless you have an inherited disease, in which case I’m sorry) I’m already exhausted. How is that possible? Five minutes down, only 65 million more to go (approximately).

8:02 a.m. – Successfully get my laptop online with the shaky convention center wifi. I am surrounded by hundreds of industry leaders. I immediately regret my decision to sit in the second row of a 600 person amphitheater. Why couldn’t I have been one of the cool kids and sit in the back. DAMN MY DEDICATION TO MY PROFESSIONAL CRAFT.

8:03 a.m. – Open a web browser and fire up the two brackets I’ve filled out. I minimize the browser so it’s just a small square in the top-left of my screen. Dutifully pretend to take notes on a presentation. Nod solemnly and crinkle my brow during lulls in a Power Point presentation I don’t understand at all. Give a few “Hmmms….” And “Wows!” to show I’m very invested. Fascinating insights.

8:04 a.m. – Brackets looks good. I immediately panic because both have way too much chalk. Duke, Michigan, UNC, Virginia final four in one; Duke, Michigan State, UNC, Virginia final four in the other. Virginia winning it all in one, UNC winning it all in the other. Not exactly taking a huge leap with either of these.

8:05 a.m. – Try to compensate for my cowardly Final Fours by picking some earlier upsets, which always go well. It’s best to tinker with your brackets, I find, mere hours before the tournament begins on a whim. Always a formula for success.

8:06 a.m. – I’ve heard great things about #13 Vermont. I pencil them in for a first round upset and feel very confident in my decision to do so. They seem RIPE to shock the world. Of course, I’m probably just daydreaming about Gus Johnson’s call of Taylor Coppenrath hitting one FROM THE PARKING LOTTTTTTTTT in 2005 against Syracuse. I know nothing of this year’s team (other than them beating my Alma mater SUNY Binghamton in the second round of the American East tournament). Fuck it. Vermont for life baby.

8:10 a.m. – Changes Vermont pick back to FSU.

8:46 a.m. – Sure, these speakers are rich and successful, but can they tell me if UCF stands any chance against Duke in the second round?! Probably.

9:01 a.m. – I keep getting notifications from my phone about gambling. I’m not in Jersey right now, phone, please stop reminding me. It’s really all sinking in now that during the first year of legal gambling I STILL won’t be able to gamble on the first two rounds of games. I’m like Tantalus in Hades, dying of thirst and hunger while standing in a pool of water and standing just under a tree of low hanging fruit. Each time I reach for a piece of fruit, or bend to drink from the pool, they move tantalizingly out of reach. I’m a tortured soul. I JUST WANT TO LOSE MONEY BETTING ON TEAMS I’VE NEVER SEEN PLAY, IS THAT TOO MUCH TO ASK?

9:34 a.m. – I’m hunched over my computer, debating the merits of Cincinnati and agonizing over a potential second round matchup with Tennessee, when I look over and see my boss is sitting no less than 10 feet away from me. DEAR GOD. He could have been there for 20 seconds or the last two hours, I have no idea. Need to put a bell on him so he can’t sneak up on me again.

10:02 a.m. – Look at my brackets again. I’m hearing good things about this Vermont team! Real scrappy underdog squad. They’re good for an upset over FSU, fuck it.

10:35 a.m. – Changes Vermont pick back to FSU.

11:15 a.m. – Only 45 minutes left until the tip off to Louisville and Minnesota. If you think I didn’t watch a second of either of these teams play this season, you sir would be right. If you think I don’t have strong opinions on this game, YOU SIR DON’T KNOW ME AT ALL. REVENGE GAME FOR MINNESOTA AND THE PITINO’S, BABY! What did Rick Pitino ever do to Louisville? Oh yeah, all that horrible sex stuff to that woman and the massive amount of corruption over years in the program. Yeah, but still!

12:15 p.m. – The lunch break couldn’t come quick enough, a glorious hour of uninterrupted NCAA March Madness basketball in lieu of eating lunch with potential sources for future articles and career success. Going back to my room and eating a bag of chips I bought from Starbucks for lunch is the morally correct decision.

12:25 p.m. – There’s no tradition like completely overreacting in the first minutes of the first game of the tournament. WHY DID I PICK MINNESOTA?! WHAT WAS I THINKING?! Minnesota 5, Louisville 7 after 2 minutes of play.

12:26 p.m. – Minnesota hits a three to go up 8 to 7. I AM A BRACKET STAR. A BIG BRIGHT SHINING STAR.

12:31 p.m. – Body Armour sports drink? Perfect, there aren’t enough sports drinks on the market already. You mean to tell me this one tastes great AND REPLENISHES VITAL BODY NUTRIENTS AND ELECTROLYTES SO I CAN WATCH BASKETBALL ON MY ASS AT PEAK PERFORMANCE? I am sold, baby. Plus James Harden endorses it, so you know it’s great. I can’t wait to see this commercial 10,000 times over the course of the next three weeks.

12:33 p.m. – Jarvis Omersa on Minnesota has a shockingly frosted blonde curly afro. It’s….odd, to say the least. I feel weird commenting on it. Forget I mentioned it.

12:34 p.m. – God that afro is amazing. Omersa was just subbed out. I’ll miss him.

12:35 p.m. -Just realized his afro is bleached blonde because Minnesota are the GOLDEN gophers. I am an idiot.

12:37 p.m. – Louisville is up four. I’ve already metaphorically ripped my bracket to pieces. The lesson, as always, is Minnesota and all of its denizens can go straight to hell.

12:38 p.m. – Minnesota cuts the lead to one after a gorgeous steal. SKOL SKOL SKOL SKOL!

12:40 p.m. – I’ve paid more attention to half an hour of this game than anything else I’ve done today.

12:41 p.m. – Dupree McBrayer nails a three to put Minnesota up by 1 after a 9-1 run! Fuck yeah, Minnesota. Maybe you’re all not a bunch of morons and losers like previously thought! McBrayer, of course, is the brother of famed 30 Rock actor Jack McBrayer (unconfirmed).

12:44 p.m. – I had no idea there was even another game going on. LSU is trouncing Yale after 5 minutes of play. Hmm…who would have thought a team of finely tuned LSU athletes would put a hurting on five nerds from Yale who miss their abacuses? Combine that with the voodoo curse undoubtedly levied on the Yale program by a Louisiana valedictorian who was denied admission because they needed room on the wait list for Lori Loughlin’s dimwitted daughter and it’s bad news for the Yalies.

12:47 p.m. – Nine to nothing for LSU now. One of the Yale forwards collapsed at center court and started speaking in tongues as black blood spewed forth from his eyes. He coughed up an entire skull as several EMTs wearing ratty tophats with crows on their shoulders carted him off the field. Great sign for the Yalies!

12:49 p.m. – Omersa takes a huge charge! IS THE FRO OK? PLEASE GIVE US AN UPDATE.

12:55 p.m. – The afternoon sessions of this conference are about to start. Boo. BOO I SAY. I turn off my room television and let a out a hearty SIGH to nobody. That was fun.

1:15 p.m. – Walking back to the conference I pass another guest who is wearing a Louisville hat. I give him a knowing nod and point to my head as if I’m wearing the same hat. I am not, nor am I wearing any hat at all. My nod goes unreturned.

2:15 p.m. – I’m now reduced to checking the scores on my phone as the meeting is more and more crowded and I can’t risk looking on my computer. After rooting on Minnesota for the last two hours, I check both of my brackets and find that I had actually picked Louisville to win in each. CRIPES. I’m guaranteed to make this mistake no less than 200 times more over the course of the tournament.

2:20 p.m. – Louisville down 10 with 40 seconds left. They’re about to be prematurely ejected from the tournament, a huge bust that disappoints everyone as always. The ghost of Rick Pitino still haunts the program.

3 p.m.  – JESUS CHRIST, the voodoo curse held on just enough for LSU to stave off Yale’s push and win by five. The gumbo pots will be a boiling tonight in the big easy. Yale fans probably had no idea there was even a game today. WHO COULD CARE ABOUT SPORTS AT A TIME WHEN THE ECONOMY IS IN SUCH SHAMBLES? LSU notches me my first win of the day. Now we’re COOKING baby.

3:12 p.m. – Those goddamn Vermont hippies are tied with FSU at halftime. Hopefully they’ll listen to the great Phish song “Bird Vacuum” at halftime to pump themselves up and forget they have to come out to for the second half. Playing in all-hemp uniforms must be itchy as hell.

3:13 p.m. – Trying to get updates on my phone and computer without actually watching these games absolutely sucks. It’s just the worst. Prisoners of war aren’t subjected to such torturous conditions. When is the Geneva Convention ever going to work in my favor for a change?

3:43 p.m. – AUBURN…what it is you doing, baby?! I go away for 30 minutes and come back to this? TO THIS?! I’m not mad, I’m just disappointed. I can smell Bruce Pearl’s flop-sweat from here. 77-76 with 8 seconds left….do we have the first huge upset of the day?! New Mexico State University, will you pull this off? Si or no?

3:49 p.m. – Twitter tells me Auburn fouled a shooter taking a three point attempt with 1 second left. I’m sure this isn’t as exciting as it sounds. I’m probably not missing a whole lot, right? I’m having just as much fun as everyone else.

3:50 p.m. -And the NMSU bastard promptly misses two of three free throws to bail out fat faced Pearl. You blew it, kid, I’m sure that moment won’t haunt you forever. By the way, I want to die. This is awful. Even my phone is sending me notifications asking me why I’m a loser and not watching these games on TV.

4 p.m. – My computer is dead. Long live my computer. The battery gave out after a nearly 7-hour struggle. She was a good computer and she’ll rise again when I get back to my room. I’m reduced to writing updates on my phone and EMAILING them to myself like I’m in a Conestoga wagon train heading West on the Oregon trail. Our supplies are low. That NMSU kid who missed the free throws has died of malaria. My brother Fartface is in ill-health.

4:10 p.m. – FSU holding off the unwashed masses of Vermont University despite the overpowering stench of patchouli oil emanating from the Vermont bench. Looks like Vermont’s performance down the stretch wasn’t too “groovy” as they’re down 8 with 2 minutes left.

4:11 pm – Just noticed MSU is down 1 at halftime to Bradley. That certainly wouldn’t be too crunch if they lost. If you gave me 10 chances to win a million dollars to tell you where Bradley is I wouldn’t come close. is it a trick question? Is it in American Samoa? Maybe the real Bradley University has been in our hearts all along?

4:15 p.m.– They’ll be crying CBD oil tears in their bongs tonight up in Vermont. Get a job, hippies. Part-time ski instructor at Killington doesn’t count if you’re only paid in weed and gummies. GROW UP.

4:28 p.m. – MSU pulling away now from American Samoa’s Bradley University. Tom Izzo and NCAA Tournament success are as consistent as John Harbaugh losing to Notre Dame every year! FOLKS! LET ME TELL YA!

4:29 p.m. – I’m so, so tired. I’ve been in this horribly lit convention center going on 11 hours now. What news is there of the outside world? Who’s the president?! WHAT YEAR IS IT?

4:39 p.m. – I swear to god this presenter gave the same presentation in the morning. I feel my soul rising away from my husk of a shell body.

4:40 p.m. – My decades dead grandma appeared before me and is urging me to let go of it all. Is that bad? She looks glorious.

4:41 p.m. – Tell my wife and son I love them.

4:42 p.m. – I’m so cold.

4:43 p.m. – I can barely breathe. I feel my heart slowing. I let out a prayer for forgiveness for my tortured soul before it leaves this ethereal plane.

4:44 p.m. – MSU up four. Sweet.

4:45 – My eyes shut for a mere moment….and the presenter finally stops blathering on and the director says the days events are over. Is it true? Could it really be true? I burst through the doors of the convention center and grab the nearest person I can find.

“Tell me, what day is it? For the love of god what day?” I ask.

“Today? Why, it’s NCAA Tournament day, sir!” He responds, as I run through the halls of the convention center, set free from my shackles to return to my hotel and watch the remaining slate of games unfettered. What joy! What freedom!

Until I realize I have to stay in this conference until Sunday.

Kill me now.

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